Who payed the critics

Brilliant and touching

Very interesting film. Was caught on the premise when seeing the trailer but unsure as to what the outcome would be for the showing. As it turns out, it was a very good film.

Great movie. Not sure what people expected but I found it highly entertaining.

Viewed on DVD. Restoration =ten (10) stars; subtitles = four (4) stars; cinematography/lighting = two (2) stars. Director Nagisa Oshima's what-ever-sticks-to-the-wall film experiment sans an exposure meter. A muddled scenario serves mainly as a vehicle for the Director to show off. Most of the photo play consists of truncated (due to Oshima 's use of TV-style close-ups in a wide-screen format) heads incessantly talking about suicide, sex, suicide, and, oh yes, suicide. To break up the monotony, the Director has the camera drift from side to side across the faces of speakers as if they are adrift in a slowly-rocking boat. The lead actor's character comes across more as simple minded rather than as a menacing sex "demon" (or crazed rapist). Lead actresses valiantly try to rise above the banal script despite being saddled with lines consisting of endless variations on themes of suicide (and sex). (Arguably the best line in the script is when a character laments that she has already had two unsuccessful suicides and she is only 20 years old!) While at some level this is meant to be a sex movie, nonetheless Oshima manages to leverage his repetitious direction into viewer disinterest followed by abject boredom-- despite throwing just about "everything" on the let's-shock-the-viewer menu into his mash-up (from hang-'em-high suicides to startling nudity to necrophilia, and on and on). Cinematography (wide screen, black and white) comes across as little better than a home movie with most scenes over or under exposed (the brightness of many exterior scenes may force some viewers to dawn sunglasses to avoid headaches!). Scene-to-scene lighting continuity is close to none existent. Subtitles can be a tad too long and have a tendency to flash by too quickly (the translator would appear to have only a limited familiarity with Kansai-Ben (Western dialog)). The film score is okay, but nothing great. Sound is fine. Recommend skipping this sleep-inducing ego trip! WILLIAM FLANIGAN, PhD.

This movie has something incredible. The fastness. We are put, since the first scenes, in a crazy mood made of hunger rather than satisfaction. And this hunger is the one of a rapist. Eisuke, the "demon of noon" is a serial sexual abuser that, as we witness from the first minutes, tries to put his hands of fury over a young girl called Shino, a waiter who lives in Kansai. Far from her native village in Nagano prefecture from which the "demon" belongs too. Before moving, however, Shino used to have sex with Genji the son of the village master in which she used to live. The reason was escaping from poverty after a flood that destroyed almost all the house of the place they both belong to. The hunger of the girl became so the reason she slept with him. However, he really liked her. So this leaded to a double suicide of love. The Japanese call it "shunji" and could have been a traditional element for a classic plot. But Oshima is an innovator. In fact, Genji, liked by a shy village school teacher called Matsuko, is the only one to die. Shino was escaped and raped by Eisuke, the demons that here makes his first crime. So we realize that Shino was raped twice. Matsuko, rather than feel lost, is more and more attracted by Eisuke, and Shino, after the second rape, decides to inform her the real identity of the demon. The problem is that Matsuko and Eisuke are now a married couple. The teacher, is shy as ever, but this happens only on the surface. And, in Japan especially, not every time to appear means to be. We discover she is so much attracted by his violent and beastly drunk husband to avoid to help the girl. However, at one point, she decides to help but, after the death condemn to Eisuke, to end her days in a double suicide with Shino. They did it but Shino another time survives. Explaining the plot here is necessary to understand the themes of a story completely untidy made of flashbacks and close ups that seem trying to show us the inner soul of the characters. This is given by the fact that this plot evolves under the skins. Under the surface. Even if the violence occurs at noon. Here Matsuko is not a wife as Ozu could have imagined. Here we have a demon that lies under her as well as the characters of Nomura's movies. The forest, however, as the idea of the sun as heat rather than light, is a theme yet developed in Kurosawa's Rashomon where we have, as in this movie, a generally hidden act that lies under the sun and not surrounded by fog.Another thing very important is the political message behind this work. Even id we are not in a move like "Night and fog of Japan" where this element is stressed more we can consider the two dead victims, Genji and Matsuko, the real couple of "shunji". They, being both pure before the flood, somehow loved each other but were attracted by the flesh and instincts after the order was destroyed. Eisuke is the tool that, creating the chaos, can show us this. As well the easiness that makes Shino living without caring too much about, not only her liar soul, but also her violated body. She concerns only about the goal. That is eating after the starvation. As the postwar Japan did in front of the bombings by the Americans while old officers were killing themselves. The hunger, if reaches a goal, so not as happens with Eisuke, who feels a thirsts of passions, can be justified. And Shino wins as Japan did.

Oshima's Violence at Noon is a meditation on the destructive capacity of love. It traces the course of a grotesque love triangle between a rapist and two women who both love him, leading to an ultimately tragic conclusion.This is a deliberately deep, art house film, with much ponderous dialogue. The dialogue serves as much to express Oshima's ideas on love as to advance the plot, with lines such as "Love has no rewards." The film also features some great cinematography, with excellent use of black and white. A sequence in which a violent attack is represented by a series of photographs is a particular highlight.However, the film suffers from a tendency to let ideas take precedence over characterization. We often have little idea why the characters do certain actions, a particular problem given that some of their activities are extreme. Ultimately, this is a thought-provoking film that at times descends into the head scratching.

I bought a rare copy of this for $1 at my local library, being a fan of foreign (especially Japanese) cinema, and never having heard of the director, Nagisa Oshima. I definitely cannot say that the film is bad, because like the reviewer above, I did not understand it. It isn't that I had difficulty following what was happening in the storyline, which was pretty straightforward, but I just had no idea what the intent of the filmmakers were, what the purpose of the story was. The storyline is so bizarre and sensationalistic - a serial rapist and his relationship with both his wife and one of his victims, all three of whom used to be part of some kind of commune for intellectuals (I didn't even know it was a commune until reading another reviewer's synopsis) - that I am sure there must be some underlying symbolism or message here the director was trying to convey. Maybe it had something to do with Japanese society of the time (1966), I'm not sure? Therefore, I must give my opinion of the outward details of the film. The black-and-white cinematography of the film was exquisite, and the constant cutting of shots from scene to scene was highly impressive. It is obvious a great deal of energy and resources were put into the production. This film is outwardly exceedingly beautiful, on a par with other such visual Japanese films as "Kwaidan" and "Kagemusha." The music score was arresting, as well. Other reviewers all seem to compare this to the work of French director Alain Resnais, but I have never seen any of his films. To me, the film seemed distantly related to the works of Stanley Kubrick in its meticulous attention to visual compositions (I saw the film in widescreen, and I can't even imagine watching it in full screen) and its delving into very dark, uncharted psychological territory. Another film to compare this to is Nicholas Roeg's "Bad Timing: A Sensual Obsession" - another dark, non-linear, visually beautiful film whose themes were very difficult to penetrate. The other major drawback is the length - this film does seem to go on about a half hour too long.I would love to have a conversation with the director on just what the storyline means, but unfortunately, I had to watch it without any frame of reference. That made it a frustrating intellectual experience, but an impressive aesthetic one.