Film

Diary of a Shinjuku Thief (1968)

Director: Nagisa Oshima

Movie review

From Time Out Film Guide

One of Oshima's most teasing and provocative collages, inspired by the student riots of '68 and contemporary 'youth culture' generally. The main thread running through it is the relationship between a passive and vaguely effeminate young man and an aggressive and vaguely masculine young woman. They meet when he steals books and she poses as a shop assistant who catches him in the act; they spend the rest of the movie trying to reach satisfactory orgasms with each other. Their route takes them through a dizzying mixture of fact and fiction, from an encounter with a real-life sexologist to involvement in a 'fringe' performance of a neo-primitive kabuki show. The logical connections are there, but they're deliberately submerged in a welter of contrasting moods, styles and lines of thought.

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