This movie manages to undo every romantic notion of poverty and life in the slums anyone might have. The characters here are not noble, or unfortunate and they are not victims. They are simply all cruel animals clawing on each other to get to the top of the jar. Every character's face is continually covered with sweat and if they are not afflicted with some deformity you can usually see the bones under their meager flesh. There is little distinction of charcters in the film. It is like an entymologists film of an ant-colony. Oshima's best film in my opinion, it doesn't suffer from the misogyny of "Cruel Story of Youth." or the try hard porno universe of "In the Realm of the Senses". These things are combined with a brutal realism that makes this film the most surreal and shocking, but without trying to be.
Review of The Sun's Burial
