Some people called Oshima the Godard of Japan (he jokingly called Godard the Oshima of France, and perhaps he was right) for the provocative 1960 trilogy (Cruel Story of Youth, The Sun's Burial, and Night and Fog in Japan) in which he bent the rules of cinema to his own ends to convey pent-up sexuality and disillusionment among Japan's postwar generation, the urban castoffs of a failed democratic revolution. Cruel Story of Youth contrasts the attempt of two mod lovers to live outside the moral boundaries of their society, with the stifled existence of the girl's older sister and her doctor-friend, both of whom had been radicals in their own youth in a movement that came to naught. Oshima subverts two sacred cows of sophisticated moviemaking--color and widescreen--to create a disparate surface of controlled chaos, consciously drawing on the commercial sex-and-violence films popular in Japan yet investing tabloid sensationalism with an absorbing psychological and political dimension. He ignores the politesse of ‘scope in jerky, hand-held tracking shots, or by cruelly relegating his two heroes to the far edges of the wide screen. Close-ups tend to isolate not characters, but objects--a telephone, a cigarette, a body-part--and nothing and no one finds a center or a mate. There is a sexual surface to this film that harks back to the Japanese erotic woodcut; here, the challenge and the joy lie in noting the passion amid a universe of glaring neon, garish colors, and gleaming metal motorcycles.