The film that established Japan’s “New Wave,” and brought more freedom to its filmmakers to make films they wanted to make. It’s the second feature of the 28-year-old Nagisa Oshima (“Violence at Noon”/”In the Realm of the Senses”/”Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence”) and his first box-office hit. It also must be said that the filmmaker rejected the New Wave label, but his film led the way for future Japanese films to be more sexually revealing. His film is an anti-Ozu film that offers an embittered take on the moral disillusionment of youth in a changing postwar Japan, and he does it through shock and with some active and stylish camera work. To fully come to grips with it requires a sound understanding of the politics of Japan, and the realization that Oshima’s reflections on society are coming from a Marxist point of view. Filled with unsympathetic characters, including the leads who lack any scruples, Oshima’s teen drama nevertheless hits a raw nerve and makes one wince as he uses stunningly effective visuals and an ill-fated Bonnie and Clyde romance story to hammer away at a contemporary Japanese society adrift.

The film’s heroine is Mako (Miyuki Kuwano), a naive middle-class girl from a protective family who falls for wannabe gangster boyfriend Kiyoshi (Yusuke Kawazu), who comes out of nowhere and saves her from being raped by an older man who gave her a car ride home but instead takes her to a dark back road. Kiyoshi becomes her savior and initiates the frightened girl in sex and schemes a racket whereby he uses her as bait in extorting cash from middle-aged salarymen with dough who give her rides–which gives him a charge that he can stick it to the older generation. Without her knowledge, the penniless student receives money from a wealthy older woman in support for his sexual services, and he rents out his room to others for their trysts. She quits college and moves in with him, and for the moment the doomed romantics push aside their poverty and vulnerabilities to frolic on motorcycles and find a pulpish sort of love.