Seven years before Godard's La Chinoise, Oshima dared to devote a feature film to investigating the factions and nuances of left-wing politics in Japan; the move cost him his contract at Shochiku studios. In a strident subversion of both ritual and romance, Oshima turns a wedding into the occasion for an all-out, angry debate between members of the wedding--comrades in a long, communist-youth struggle culminating in the protest against the Japanese American security treaty--and the groom, a newspaper reporter whose behavior in the recent demonstrations is questioned. Continuing his audacious exploration of widescreen space, in this film Oshima virtually destroys depth-of-field in order to travel through time on a horizontal plane. Flashbacks-within-flashbacks unfold out of a fog through which Oshima obscures any illusion of real time or space. At times, only his dizzying pans about the room convey the violent conflicts between otherwise static characters; at others, music drowns out their impassioned speeches. It is a still, Noh drama intercut with sporadic bursts of hyperactivity. It is radical politics in Japan.