United Red Army

Jitsoruku: Rengo Sekigun--Asama Sanso e no Michi

(Japan, 2007, 189 mins)

35mm

Canadian Premiere

Selected Filmography:  

PRODS: Ozaki Noriko, Otomo Asako, Wakamatsu Koji
SCR: Wakamatsu Koji, Kakegawa Masayuki, Otomo Asako
CAM: Tsuji Tomohiko, Toda Yoshihisa
ED: Wakamatsu Koji
MUS: Jim O’Rourke
Cast: Sakai Maki, Arata, Namiki Akie, Jibiki Go, Onishi Shima, Uda Takaki, Kokido Toshimitsu, Tamoto Soran

Wakamatsu Koji’s epic-scale docu-drama brilliantly reconstructs the most troubling episode in the bloody history of Japanese student-radical extremism. The film opens with a short history of the radical movements of the 1960s (rooted in opposition to the renewal of the US-Japan Security Pact), which led to the founding of the United Red Army from two surviving splinter groups in the summer of 1971. Headed by Mori Tsuneo and Nagata Hiroko--political soulmates who eventually became lovers--the group retreated to a succession of "training camps" in the mountains of Gunma Prefecture, sustained by pooled cash and armed with stolen weapons. There followed a terrifying quest for "ideological purity" marked by the torture and murder of "backsliders" and the hunting down and execution of attempted defectors. When Mori and Nagata were caught at a police roadblock, the group fragmented. Five members holed up in a ski lodge on Mount Asama, where they were massacred in a ten-day siege in February, 1972.

The film brings all of this to visceral life, passing no judgments but implicitly suggesting that this was the last generation in Japan which actually believed in something, and lived and died for its beliefs. Wakamatsu (whose "radical porno" films of the 1960s were championed by Oshima Nagisa) knew some members of the United Red Army at the time, and his recreation of their desperate lives and futile deaths is shockingly believable from start to finish.

-- Tony Rayns

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