This had been hanging around my must-see list for so long as to curdle into vague assumptions and baffled expectations. The result was so out of left field that even the film’s rather extreme sense of time and tedium was not enough to click into its mindset. I can say that this should be sandwiched between L’Amour fou and Zabriskie Point as one of the more epic studies of late-60s revolutionary youth. Yoshida's exceedingly cryptic use of Japanese history was borderline impenetrable to me, or maybe it didn’t matter; half of the film’s focus is on a revolutionary/anarchist/feminist couple in the 1910s but instead of focusing on their nationalist or humanist politics Yoshida is interested in their social politics. But perhaps that’s even a misnomer, for, like the other half of the film that sets its sight on two wanton, wandering revolutionary youths in 1969 Japan, struggling against and for the same things as those in the past with seemingly no progress made except in how each can express their turmoil, Eros Plus Massacre’s actual angle of attack is very obscure. It certainly isn’t psychological drama, and I don’t think it is even representational in its depiction of humans, which makes the near-kammerspiel-like approach to the 1910s section truly baffling and abstract. Combine this with Yoshida’s ultra-rare quality of truly baring Antonioni’s torch of extreme, two-dimensional graphic compositions—the framing throughout is nearly catastrophically off-center—as to really ask fundamentally questions like "why?" Utterly perplexing, but clearly utterly requisite. I haven’t quite figured out why it is either of those things, at least not yet.

I feel like in describing a certain kind of movie, that where the narrative supposedly travels with an object rather than a character, the descriptions over-emphasize how literal this conceit is. Yes, Winchester '73 and Madame de... are sort of structured around a rifle and a pair of earrings respectively, but it isn't until I saw this film, which is narratively structured around the movements of a caterpillar around Japan, that the purity of the idea, as well as its failings, come to light. The episodic content is mostly lame, and despite Kuroki's exuberance in filmmaking this is his debut feature) , really needed someone smartly, slyly subversive like Oshima or Masumura to both reign in a degree of stable intelligence to the story and the style, as well as clarify it for greater political oomph. That being said, the final reel, where the caterpillar seems to precipitate the re-militarization of Japan, inspire gang wars, and perhaps trigger an atomic bomb detonation point towards these object-narratives as being most exciting when the non-empathetic inspires the non-empathetic, objects precipitating a pleasurably distanced unfolding of uninvolved events.

If we can describe Maurice Pialat's movies as raw-raw, I venture to say that Jacques Doillon's are, after seeing 1996's Ponette, are sleek-raw: the emotion is there as frighteningly strong and frontal as Pialat's, but Doillon's characters put a face on top of that emotion. It is not a mask per se, but it is a face of someone constantly thinking, constantly considering. We see them feel, but before that we see them thinking about what they are feeling. It puts a layer between their truest emotions and the world around them, as if they have to first process the drama, process the situation that is happening to them right now before they can absorb it and feel something. In fact, Ponette, which is about the eponymous girl (eerily, affectingly and effectively played by Victoire Thivisol), is entirely about watching this young girl process, absorb, fight, and come to terms with the fact that her mother just died. The plot has her grasp at and discard a variety of quasi-religious, quasi-mystical attempts to recapture her mother: unable to conjure her up at night, she turns to God to try to speak to her mother, but unable to speak to God she then tries to conjure up God. While on paper the story seems like it could be a tritely allegorial tale of the rationale behind searching for and being disappointed by different kinds of faith, Doillon's attention is entirely turned to how Thivisol (as the character but perhaps more disturbingly as an actress) thinks, considers, and is consternated and frustrated by her feelings and her thoughts and her inability to rectify them with the world. This is why practically the entire movie is shot in long lens with the characters constantly moving back and forth sideways along the x-axis of the frame: pursuing and fleeing one another, always thinking, always on the move, processing, trying to figure the thing out, whatever the thing may be. I'm actually surprised the film can hold up it's 90-some-odd-minute run time, for, all due consideration given to Doillon's story, Ponette is simply about the way Ponette thinks (and the look and feel of this thinking) as she walks back and forth.