Go, Go Second Time Virgin

Koji Wakamatsu (that’s Waka to his friends and Mr. Wakamatsu to you, pal) was raised to be a farmer but made his move to the big city and tried his hand at being a gangster and a convict before he found his true calling (with no formal training) as Japan’s most notorious experimental movie director, a Grade B Godard who made over 30 films between 1963 and 1974, many of them too raw and disturbing to be shown in theaters but acclaimed at fine-film festivals, an example of which is Go, Go, Second-Time Virgin, a jazzy, intense, avant-garde dream-vision of suicide, rape, insanity, and mass murder on the rooftop of an inner-city apartment building, simultaneously both poetic and luridly sensational, with startling alternations between scenes shot in bleak black-and-white and scenes shot in psychedelic, candy-bright color, and although I can’t decide whether it’s high art or sleazy sexploitation or both, I do know that the love story it evolves into is the sickest I’’ve ever seen.