1971-1980 Arthouse Asian Japan Nagisa Oshima

Nagisa Ôshima – Natsu no imoto AKA Dear Summer Sister (1972)

adminAugust 5, 2020

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“Certainly the oddest Oshima film yet to surface in this country,” was how Vincent Canby, an Oshima champion, characterized Dear Summer Sister when it got its first New York release in 1985, and the film remains quite amazingly strange.

The director takes a very serious subject – the return of Okinawa to Japan from American control – and gives it a pop, almost parodic feel, with a floating camera and free-form narrative. … Though he claimed at the time that the film was very clear and straightforward, Oshima keeps adding all manner of strange characters and incidents, hints of incest and illegitimacy, a murder plot, and commentary on Japan’s war crimes and abuse of Okinawa, all the while maintaining a breezy, sometimes farcical tone. The effect is sometimes enchanting, sometimes baffling. “Dear Summer Sister has something of the manner of a frisky Japanese homage to Michelangelo Antonioni…. The performances are good, especially those of Hiromi Kurita as Sunaoko and an actress simply called Lily as Momoko. The photography – this time by Yasuhiro Yoshioka – is exceptionally bright and vivid, as it always is in Oshima’s work.”