Critics reviews

For Oshima, the circular family tree of oppression can only conclude via utter negation, the edge where madness meets illumination. Hou paints a contrasting cycle of bloodlines in City of Sadness, Stone in W. has the spectral baseball match.

Its strategies for staging oppressive and fascinating psychodrama are among the most effective in Ôshima's oeuvre. This sordid, hypnotic death-trip is an incomparably entrancing slog, a workout that finds its punk auteur at his polemical and artistic best.

The film is a cubist portrait of an extended family in postwar Japan. The narrative gradually reveals histories of incest, war crimes, and suicide within a powerful industrialist's clan, and the approach alone embodies the major theme of Oshima's work, if not the Japanese New Wave as a whole: the brutal confrontation with the nation's imperial past, which left countless foreigners dead and many Japanese in a cycle of poverty that continued well after the war.

In its idiosyncratically alchemic fusion of bituminous humor, fractured narrative logic, bracing social interrogation, and sublimated depictions of perverted sexuality, The Ceremony is a provocative and excoriating satire on the amorphous nature of modern Japanese identity that could only have been forged in the wake of Nagisa Oshima's increasing disillusionment with the impotence of the left movement.

The Ceremony pulls together themes and devices from several of Oshima's previous films into a masterful summation. As in Night and Fog in Japan, the flashbacks qualify and condition our understanding of the present: the family, for all its outward prosperity, is rotting from the inside out, and from the top down.

If you were bored by In the Realm of the Senses, this 1971 film by Nagisa Oshima offers much more convincing proof of his talent. A deadly parody of one of Japan's most beloved genres, the family saga, The Ceremony uses the story of the Sakurada clan as a mirror for the cultural decay of Japan in the wake of World War II. Influenced by Godard, Oshima employs a collapsing montage technique that transforms melodramatic cliche into metaphysical horror.

A brilliant and haunting insight into the tensions between the old and the new in Japan. The emotional explosions are morbid and yet moving, and one never really knows what is going to happen next. "Ceremony" is a truly modern film, but with classical echoes, and it is not to be missed.

It is a study of post-war Japan over twenty-five years, done not as an epic or a documentary but with Oshima's characteristic simplicity as a domestic drama—delicate, personal, tragic and sentimental, an allegory that mirrors an infinite vista of further lives.

The film conveys an extraordinary concentration of force... Ozu, the traditionalist, suggested that the Japanese live lives of quiet desperation. Oshima, a visceral intellectual, shows hysteria beating against formality – and erupting in a scene of Jacobean extravagance, when a wedding without a bride turns into a wake for a murdered wedding guest, and the hero hurls the bandage-swathed corpse from its coffin and lies down in its place, an aghast rebel.