A Tale of Sorrow and Sadness

April 21, 2020
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Film

Tuesday, April 21, 7 PM 
  
PLEASE NOTE: To ensure the safety of all in our community, this film series and screening has been canceled and our building temporarily closed to the public. Please visit our COVID-19 page for information on ticket refunds, donations, and our virtual program initiatives.

Fired from Nikkatsu studio for making “incomprehensible” films, iconoclastic filmmaker Seijun Suzuki returned to the director’s chair after a decade of exile working in television with this characteristically bizarre critique of advertising and celebrity culture based on a story by sports manga legend Ikki Kajiwara (Ashita no Joe). In need of a new cover girl to boost advertising sales, the top brass of a large sports magazine manufacture the latest Japanese sports star: an amateur golfer who looks good in a bikini. When the golfer’s fame attracts the unwanted attention of a crazed housewife stalker, however, she finds herself terrorized by a blackmail scheme and Suzuki makes a sharp turn into surreal psychological thriller territory.

“It’s as biting a condemnation of fleeting and meaningless celebrityhood as anything produced in Hollywood, and one of Suzuki’s most successful fusions of his chaotic style with a script that supports those visual ambitions.” -Film Comment

“Extreme…A pitch-black satire about the wages of fame. Chaotic and hard to follow, the film is also compulsively watchable, for its savage sendup of 1970s styles of commercialism and celebrity and for its wild expressionist touches.” –The New York Times  

1977. 93 min. 35mm, color, in Japanese with English subtitles. Directed by Seijun Suzuki. With Yoko Shiraki, Yoshio Harada, Masumi Okada, Koji Wada.

Tickets: $14/$11 seniors, students and persons with disabilities/$10 Japan Society members
Screening of Sumo Do, Sumo Don’t + Sumo Party: $18/$15/$14

3-Film Pass: $2 off each ticket when you purchase three films in the same transaction.

All-Access Pass: $77 ($7 per ticket for all 11 films in the series)

This program is part of our Aim for the Best: Sports in Japanese Cinema series.

Program subject to change. For updated info and special offers, please visit: japansociety.org/film

Box Office Policy

  • Tuesday, April 21, 2020
  • 7:00 pm