The Sun's Burial is a 1960 film from Japan directed by Nagisa Oshima.
It is a story about the ragged underclass in Osaka. They live in dirty slums in ramshackle wooden shacks. Crime is rampant and law enforcement is nearly nonexistent. Takeshi is a naive youth who thinks it might be a good idea to join a gang. He soon changes his mind, but Shin, the leader of his gang, refuses to let him leave. Meanwhile, a young woman named Hanako bounces back and forth between the various gangs and petty criminals of the slums, playing them off against each other. She is a prostitute by night, but in the daytime runs another racket, where the hungry and desperate people of the slums sell their blood, which Hanako then sells to cosmetics companies for use in their products.
Enter the "Agitator", a deranged older man who totes around a hand grenade he says is from the war. The Agitator talks wild nonsense about how the Russians are about to invade and the Japanese must rise up and bring back the old Empire, but he's so self-assured that the desperate people of the slums start to listen to him. He cuts Hanako out of her blood racket, so she goes to Shin for support.
Tropes:
- The Alcoholic: Batasuke, who drinks himself into oblivion on a regular basis. His wife holds him in contempt and is openly carrying on an affair with a neighbor right in front of him.
- Cigarette Burns: Shin burns Yasu, one of his minions, with a cigarette when Yasu pisses him off.
- Crapsack World: The slums of Osaka, where people live in tumbledown shacks, trudge through the mud, and sell their blood for money.
- Driven to Suicide: Batasuke, in the depths of alcoholic despair and humiliated by his wife's affair, hangs himself—in public.
- Gentle Giant: One of the residents of the slum is a man who seems like he might have acromegaly; he has an enlarged face and looks like he might be seven feet tall. He is the only person to express any tender feeling when poor Batasuke is found having hanged himself; the giant says that Batasuke was a nice man who sometimes gave him money.
- Interplay of Sex and Violence: The confrontation between Takeshi, Hanako, and the rape victim ends with Hanako shoving the rape victim off a ledge to her death. Takeshi and Hanako run off—and moments later they are having sex in the grass.
- Japanese Delinquents: They don't really rise to the level of Yakuza. Just young people, who have taken to crime because there's no better option in their miserable world.
- Kubrick Stare: The girl that Tatsu raped does this right before she comes after Takeshi with a knife. Hanako jumps in and shoves the girl off the ledge to her death.
- Leg Focus: For Fan Disservice and the creepiest scene in a film filled with awful, deplorable people. Hanako is sleeping in an upper bunk, and her bare calves have slipped off the bunk and are dangling. Her father, Yosematsu, comes in, and stares at her calves. He makes an ineffectual effort to pull her slip down...he makes an ineffectual effort to do a Comforting Comforter and pull her blanket up...then he stares at her calves a little more. Then she kicks him in the face.Hanako: Pervert! My own father!
- Lingerie Scene: Hanako is shown in slips or a bustier in multiple scenes. Then there are all the prostitutes that the Shin gang keeps, who also lounge around in slips, although in this case it's closer to Fan Disservice since they're basically sex slaves.
- Mutual Kill: Shin shoots Takeshi in the chest twice, but Takeshi still holds on to Shin long enough for both of them to be run over by a train.
- Naïve Newcomer: Tatsu and Takeshi, who elect to join a gang without really thinking very much about what they were getting themselves into.
- No Name Given: The Agitator, the weird guy who carries around a grenade from the war and rants about how Japan has to recover its imperial glory, is never named.
- Off-into-the-Distance Ending: With most of their shantytown having burned down, Hanako and her friend the combat medic, the one who drew blood in her blood-selling racket, walk away, off to somewhere new to start their racket again.
- Pin-Pulling Teeth: The Agitator does this with his grenade during the final confrontation in the neighborhood.
- Rape Discretion Shot: Tatsu, Takeshi, and Hanako approach a man and woman who are making out in an abandoned field. Tatsu clubs the man over the head and tosses him aside. Then he flips the woman's skirt up—cut to Takeshi, looking on in horror.
- Resignations Not Accepted: These are pretty low-rent bottom feeder gangs, but even then, apparently one can't leave. Shin smacks Takeshi around for even thinking about leaving. When Nobuku the prostitute tries to escape Shin's clutches along with her boyfriend Yasu, the gang catches them and murders Yasu.
- Sinister Switchblade: When Takeshi starts getting too pushy about Tatsu leaving the gang along with him, Tatsu flips open a switchblade as a means of getting Takeshi to back off. Takeshi won't take no for an answer, and a fatal knife fight ensues.
- Smoking Hot Sex: Hanako lights up right after sex with Takeshi.
- Soundtrack Dissonance: The only noise heard during the fight between Takeshi and Tatsu that eventually gets Tatsu killed is a cheerful, upbeat instrumental tune.
- Streetwalker: One of Hanako's many jobs, as she walks the streets of Osaka after dark.
