Gohatto (Taboo)
Part of the BAMcinématek series The Cruel Stories of Nagisa Oshima
Tue, April 14 at 4:30, 6:50, 9:15pm
Directed by Nagisa Oshima
With Takeshi Kitano, Ryuhei Matsuda
(2000) 101min
“[A] period film of rapacious beauty, its meanings fleet as snakes…” —Film Comment
Following a period of illness, Oshima made a stunning return with this subversive, revisionist samurai tale. Set in 1865, Gohatto is the story of a young samurai trainee whose otherworldly beauty awakens latent homoerotic desires amongst his superiors. With hauntingly beautiful visuals, Oshima slyly deconstructs a familiar genre, proving that he is still among the most daring, iconoclastic directors working today.
The Village Voice on Gohatto
"Nagisa Oshima is Japan's greatest living filmmaker, and his first theatrical feature in 14 years is an action film at once baroque and austere, hypnotic and opaque—a samurai drama punctuated by thwacking kendo matches in which the romantic swordsmen keep falling in love . . . with each other." More
The Guardian on Gohatto
"...unmistakably the work of a master film-maker and a work of enormous strangeness and charm." More
San Francisco Chronicle on Gohatto
"...'Taboo' is a further, captivating extension of Oshima's marriage of the oblique and the erotic." More