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Very very predictable, including the post credit scene !!!

Memorable, crazy movie

A waste of 90 minutes of my life

Pretty good movie overall. First half was nothing special but it got better as it went along.

The Japanese New Wave is one of my favorite cinematic movements, and this film comes recommended as one of the best of its era. Very unfortunately, it didn't do much for me at all. The one thing about it that I'll say right off the bat really impressed me was the cinematography. No time and place ever produced such gorgeous black and white movies, and this is up there with the best.The film itself, though, is very slow-moving, kind of pretentious, and uninvolving. The story involves two timelines, one set in the Taisho period (starting in 1916) and the other in the present. It's about free love and the sexual revolution. In 1916, the philosopher Sakae Osugi practices and writes about free love. I'm pretty sure the Japanese word for philosopher translates literally in English to "aloof jerk," because this guy's version of free love is to screw around with different women and then say "Why can't you be chill about this?" when they confront him. In particular, Itsuko Masaoka becomes wildly jealous when he starts seeing Noe Ito on the side. She begins brandishing a knife, always threatening to get stabby with it. Late in the movie, there are like three consecutive sequences that take up a good quarter of the movie where she fulfills her promise.The 1960s stuff involves two students who are studying Osugi. They have their own problems, but want to subscribe to the free love idea, which seems to be expanding around the world. At least in the director's cut, these segments take up only about a quarter of the film.Look, I don't generally do well with long films, and perhaps this one's 3 hours and 36 minutes were just too daunting for me. The fact is, though, from the very beginning I was pretty bored with this one. 90% of the scenes just involve two or three people sitting around in a room bickering. I give Yoshida much credit for keeping it visually interesting throughout. The guy definitely has talent, but I wonder if this independently produced art film gave him too much freedom. Maybe he'd be better reigned in.Whatever the case, I'm still perfectly happy to have this new Arrow Academy box set. Outside of Criterion, they're the best home video production company today. I hope I like the other two films better, and I hope one day I get to take a look at Yoshida's earlier, studio-produced films.

This one, plus Oshima's Koshikei (Death by Hanging, 1968), Matsumoto's Bara no Soretsu (Funeral Parade of Roses, 1969), Shinoda's Shinjû: Ten no amijima (Double Suicide, 1969) and Terayama's Den'en ni shisu (Pastoral : to Die in the Country, 1974), are maybe the great accomplishments of the Japanese New Wave. Here, Yoshida starts the last political trilogy about Japanese Past and Present (Eros plus Massacre, Heroic Purgatory and Coup D'etat) using a distinctive aesthetics proving that his Cinema contains some sort of a Metamorfosical ethic.In fact, the movie builds an omnipresent dialectic between spectator and characters. History and Symbolic Representation. According to Pascal BONITZER, the "plus" of the tittle is a metonymy for the movie relation and revelation: "You must play too, because you can't dominate it. You must attach, dis-attach, and transform one and another: «Eros» and «Massacre». The spectator is the local of application. The spectator is the plus (+)."

Yoshida's Eros Plus Massacre is an AMAZING example of what narrative cinema can do with time and space, establishing characters that exist in a world of their own and yet feel very real (and are in fact based on some real people.) Ito Noe and Osugi Sakae were lovers and friends who fanned the flames of anarchist and leftist controversy during one the Taisho era (Japan's Weimar or Roaring 20s.) Noe was a writer who became Osugi Sakae's, an anarchist revolutionary and writer, lover. They were murdered by the state police after the Kano earthquake of 1923 (which was, in some ways and places, blamed on anarchist, immigrants, and other illogical things.) Yoshida places us in the present day through rebellious college students, one an extremely sexual female who plays games with police and film directors the entire movie, the other a nearly impotent young man who is obsessed with current events and fatalism. They replay the Taisho events in their imaginations, which we are privy to, until the imaginations begin to take place within their own reality. Soon, the two are intertwined, and we're asked as viewers to deal with some improbable and unforgettable situations that question our role as a passive audience. The story and characters of both time periods are engrossing, and combined with Yoshida's radical compositions and a combination of subdued "historical" music and late 60s trippy rock, you're thrown into a delightfully open ended plot which you'll have a hard time shaking.Yoshida's debt to Alain Resnais is on full display here. The film is a near sister to Last Year at Marienbad and Muriel. Antonioni's desolation films also come to mind, particularly The Eclipse. Yoshida's place in the Nuberu Bago (the Japanese New Wave) was cemented when David Desser named his book about the movement after this film, and its worth the advertisement. This is available in Japan without subs, and you can probably find it somewhere in the trading world with English subtitles, but it needs a proper DVD release (along with EVERY OTHER YOSHIDA film.) Highly highly recommended to any film fan with an open mind.

The opening sequence is framed an cut in such a modern way that you would think that you are in a movie of the present. It totally graps your attention and doesn't let go till the end. If you have any chance to see this movie in the original 202min. cut - use it !!