Takashi Miike looks up to Nagisa Oshima | TIFF 2019

Shohei Imamura’s famous pronouncement, “I’m a country farmer; Nagisa Oshima is a samurai,” may be ambiguous in tone and intent (is it ironic, invidious, deferential?), but it emphasizes the pronounced differences between the two directors: class, stylistic, and otherwise. Often paired as twin avatars of the Japanese New Wave (a term that Oshima took every opportunity to spurn and disparage), given the shared elements between them — an audacity both formal and social, a rejection of the refined tenor of traditional Japanese cinema, a propensity for mixing fiction and reality, and certain key themes (sex and criminality, the abuse and resilience of women, incest, the social fissures of postwar Japan) — Imamura and Oshima nevertheless can be construed as contraries, if not opposites. Where Imamura made defiantly “messy” and “juicy” (his preferred terms) films that celebrated the irrational, the instinctual, the carnal, squalid, violent, and superstitious life of Japan’s underclass, Oshima’s films are primarily i