Le Retour des trois soûlards

The circular structure of the film, which in its second half mirrors the first one in the form of developing variations, inherent to the original arrangement, not only reminds one of Robbe-Grillet's games with Deleuzian incompossible worlds but also ideally fits the actual theme: what if a Japanese Aryan from the Far East could repeat his own life in a different form, as a member of a subordinate Korean ethnicity? The tragicomic nature of this film stems from this circularity, which only refers to the cycle of human history: the compulsive repetition of the superiority of some over others. Nagisa Ōshima's experimental sandbox, which incidentally in the film diegetically emerges from the beach, draws its strength precisely from the subversive self-contradiction, in which nothing can happen to anyone, because they are just a puppet/character in the cycle of the film reel, that can be revived at will, and the fact that from this sandbox a person quickly steps into the real world just as the monkey (a racist figure par excellence) ends after drunkenness: the end of the film merges with the bullet to the head, after which nothing follows. (08/03/2024)