Steven H wrote:lots of spoilers
What a stunning, hilarious, and unforgettable film Three Resurrected Drunkards is. The structure, or structures, of the narrative seem to be a number of things working together and against each other. It's a film about three lost and confused friends, a story of learning about oneself or growing up, a political allegory concerning racism, war guilt, revolution, and identities, both national and personal, but it's also a film about film. Three Japanese friends are having a day at the beach. While away their clothes are stolen by a mysterious hand coming out of the sand, and their student uniforms are replaced with used, and apparently cheap, clothing. After this, they are taken for two identified, and one non-identified, Korean stowaways. The confusion continues until the film takes a turn for the bizarre and surreal, both Brechtian and Bunuelian in turn.
Oshima is eagerly compared to Godard, but Oshima was as casually epic and silly as Godard was serious and self-consciously iconoclastic (though Oshima certainly had a self-consciously iconoclastic streak). Oshima would have taken Week-end and turned it into a giddy farce, with a vicious close up of Jean Yanne as he grimaces and makes an ironic statement about wasting good cars by setting them on fire for the background of a film set. The diegetic and non-diegetic big splash of an idea behind Three Resurrected Drunkards is that the film starts repeating itself, but the main characters eventually "catch up" with the film replaying and turn it to their own advantage (though certainly not very heroically.) It's very reminiscent of three other self-conscious Oshima films from the same time, The Man Who Left His WIll on Film, Diary of a Shinjuku Thief and Death by Hanging (and starring many of the same actors, particularly Sato Kei and Watanabe Fumio).
The film begins playing with our, and the three Drunkards', expectations. Logic is turned on its head (very much like in Death by Hanging) and relationships can change on a dime. We, and they, have no clue when the film will end, or who friend or foe can be, except by going on previous different versions of the film. A young woman who initially helps, becomes a villain, and her husband/father/pimp (depending on the story) changes roles as well. By the end of the film, even the Japanese drunkards have no idea who they are, and after escaping the two Koreans that attempted to steal their identities, saying to each other:
"Your acting last night was good"
"What acting?"
"That we're Korean and they're Japanese"
"Huh? But it's all true"
"Right! We're Korean!"
Since other than the Korean names, they are nameless, in some ways it's hard to know who to believe. There's a long scene shot documentary style asking seemingly random Koreans on the street if they're Japanese. The confusion of national identity versus personal identity is something Oshima had a huge interest in. In this way it almost becomes Celine and Julie Go Boating, where Celine and Julie switch roles with each other, and then switch roles with the nurse in the haunted house. Except this is more explicitly acknowledging it's own filmness and political attitudes (cultural relativism and universal human rights).
Doesn't this sound so manipulative? But how should we feel, being manipulated? Business as usual, that's what films do. By showering us with feelings of the unexpected, Oshima takes a film about mistaken identity and turns it into a film about mistaken narrative expectations. By the end of the film do we know what we're watching anymore (the characters are hopelessly confused, saying "Now the real finale, in Tokyo!" and of course, being incorrect)? By the end of the film, the political allegory of "war guilt" has risen to the surface, foreshadowing in a classic sense at the beginning of the film, the three Japanese reenact the
famous picture from the tet offensive, and this is before surreality sets in. Throughout the film, anytime a gun is pointed at someone's head, it's brought up that it doesn't look right, not the right grimace. Is Oshima wondering out loud why it takes a picture to bring the human element in so much focus (similar to Godard's Letter to Jane)? Or maybe he's using the picture as a point of repetition, like the narrative structure itself, which eventually drums it into our brains like a previously familiar word made to sound strange and new. By the end we're confronted with the "reality" of the photograph, a large mural and dual reenactments (with very little grimace.)
The three drunkards, like the audience, are never fully satisfied by the narrative, but a sentimental emotional connection, and high melodrama are definitely not what the director is after: "If it was a movie, she'd come running into my arms right now!", "If it was by a stupid Japanese director!" The main characters exclaim this towards the end (about the young Korean girl), but you can almost hear their exasperation and imagine them crying out "why can't we be in a more reasonable film!?" Reasonable films aren't nearly as much fun, of course.
I also wanted to note that there was a Pickpocket moment in Diary of a Shinjuku Thief. At the very beginning when Suzuki grabs Birdey Hilltop's arm as he's about to steal a handful of books, I could have sworn it was right out of the Bresson film.