That line is spoken in Nagisa Oshima's Sing a Song of Sex by Otake, a relatively young college professor with deplorable professional boundaries. He's referring to the students he instructs, the young people of mid-1960s Japan, who in his judgment haven't eperienced quite enough hardship to give them the rigorous character and a genuine commitment to the class struggle he thinks they need. And the songs he feels obliged to sing to them, selections from an informal anthology of bawdy chants from different regions and eras of Japanese folk culture, are, as the film's title makes clear, all about sex. At least, on the surface, for as he goes on to elaborate, their erotic content has more to do with an expression of political resistance, the individual's ability to retain some degree of autonomy and self-determination in the midst of a highly collective, militaristic and conformist society.
Even though Otake's intentions in exposing, or one might even say deliberately corrupting, his students to the lustier aspects of adult life could be seen as honorable to a certain extent, insomuch as he seeks to enlighten them to realities they have yet to experience themselves, his delivery is flawed. His goal seems to be arousing his young consorts, a posse of four young men and four young women he's rounded up for a night on the town, to the point that they would begin acting out the lyrics of the songs he taught them later on in the evening, when they're left alone without supervision at the inn where he's rented rooms for them to spend the night. The wisdom he seeks to impart takes place in the midst of a drunken escapade that turns out to have fatal consequences for him after he falls asleep with a loose heater hose spilling carbon monoxide into his room, and a consequently traumatizing effect on the students. The women express their reaction through emotional outbursts, tears and wailing, upon discovering the professor has died, while the men are strangely impassive, detached and unsympathetic to either the girls in mourning or their deceased instructor.
At the time he made Sing a Song of Sex, Nagisa Oshima was at the very forefront of the ranks of idea-driven, formally experimental and innovative directors working anywhere in world cinema. His previous film, Violence at Noon, was filmed in black and white and assembled from thousands of very short, quickly cut snippets to tell a story based on a real life serial killer and rapist who terrorized Japan in the 1950s. Here, he continues his intense, and frankly unsettling, focus on the minds and behaviors of rapists, even though here the portrayal has a more surreal and imaginary feel to it. After presenting the makings of a procedural examination of a man's death and the circumstances that led up to it, Oshima leaves the professor's demise behind and turns his focus to the four disaffected young men who memorized the song their teacher-mentor taught them on the last night of his life. The lyrics, which constitute a catalog of sorts of different circumstances and techniques for engaging in sexual activity, are applied to their own pursuit of a pretty female student they know only as "Number 469" based on the seat she occupied in the lecture hall where they had completed their exams earlier that day.
At this point, the narrative switches from something plausibly grounded in reality to a more subjective illustration of the recklessly violent, post-juvenile fantasies of unimpeded sexual conquest that preoccupy the young men. These rape sequences are disturbingly heartless, clinical and antiseptic, and one wonders about Oshima's own personal fixation on these lurid scenarios, since so many of his films appear to be dedicated to examining such imbalanced and exploitative portrayals of sexual relationships. Still, I find much to admire and ponder with satisfaction in the director's craft (fantastic compositions in red and black that take full advantage of the widescreen format) and a fascinating musical soundtrack with haunting instrumental passages dropped in at strategic moments and the jarring juxtaposition of Japanese students singing the equivalent of a "Peter, Paul and Mary's Greatest Hits" album with smutty jingle taught by the professor and a more lamentable lyric sung from the perspective of a Korean prostitute.
That Korean political angle is a new one for me to explore. Apparently Oshima took this up as a cause over the course of two subsequent films of 1968 as he sought to confront the common Japanese prejudice against Koreans following a trip to that nation shortly before he made Sing a Song of Sex. One of those films, Death By Hanging, is only available on Hulu, and isn't included in Eclipse Series 21: Oshima's Outlaw Sixties, but the next one, Three Resurrected Drunkards is. I'm eager to see where he goes on this tangent. Oshima is such an intriguing and challenging director, even though he doesn't seem to be too concerned about making his films easily accessible to the majority of viewers. He did seem interested in connecting with the more hardcore elements of the younger audience though. This foursome ventures into territory well beyond the reach of The Monkees, The Beatles or the Rolling Stones in 1967. Hoi, hoi!
Next: La collectionneuse