Set in the post-war slums of Osaka, Oshima's follow-up and companion piece to Naked Youth, follows the lives and fates of the denizens of this hellish ghetto. Pimps, prostitutes, drug addicts, vagrants, hustlers and gangsters struggle to survive amidst the poverty and decay of 1950's Japan. Unflinching in it's portrayal of life in these slums, the film goes beyond a documentary-style realism to achieve a garish, lurid Cinemascope aesthetic that is at once repulsive and yet mesmerising. It's a pitiless and dispassionate portrait of a living hell that lurks behind the facade of a prosperous new Japan, a place where everything - food, sex, even blood - is simply a commodity to be stolen and sold.
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