Kandata.

I recently discovered a director I’d never heard of, Yoshishige Yoshida (aka Kijū Yoshida, but why?), who has become one of my favorites after seeing just one movie, his 1969 Eros + Massacre (エロス＋虐殺, Erosu purasu gyakusatsu). I’m not going to recommend it to all comers, because it’s over three and a half hours long and fairly incomprehensible on first viewing, but any fan of late-’60s Godard should eat it up with pleasure; I would go so far as to call it a mashup of Two or Three Things I Know About Her (the prostitution/labor/money nexus), La Chinoise (the endless far-left factional arguments), Week-end (the sex/violence nexus, with wildly surrealistic scenes), and Le Gai savoir (good-looking young people discussing philosophy, politics, and life), not to mention that it’s so consistently gorgeous you don’t really care what it all means. The movie is available (for the time being, presumably) here; having watched it on YouTube, I immediately sent off for the Arrow Video three-Blu-ray…