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| | Bright Lights Film Journal | Gohatto |
 | | While Oshima’s chamber-piece re-creation of late Tokugawa Japan is as elegant as any Japanese film in recent memory, we must realize that this sort of mannerist poeticism is no longer the exclusive transcendental sphere of elite auteurs such as Mizoguchi, but has long since passed into the banal lexicon of Japanese pop culture. |
| | While some critics have praised Oshima’s (mildly) "experimental" use of intertitles, which tell us who is secretly enchanted with whom, or disclose plot elements omitted from the film’s diegesis, their quaint effect only exacerbates the film’s conventional lyricism, rather than being disruptive or alienating in the Brechtian sense of Oshima’s new wave period. |
| | What Oshima does in Gohatto, however, is to veil the homosexual erotica that was the film’s very selling point, and replace it with the eros of conventionally beautiful cinematography, as the visual seduction of cinematic technology becomes a displacement of the sex that Oshima, for one reason or another, refuses to explicitly show. |
| www.brightlightsfilm.com /33/gohatto1.html (3115 words) |
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