Kōji Wakamatsu has been called the most important director to emerge in the pink film genre, and one of Japan’s leading directors of the 1960s.
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Cover of the December 2000 DVD release
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Go, Go, Second Time Virgin is one of Wakamatsu’s best-known films, but discussion of it in English has been hampered by lack of availability. The relentlessl downbeat atmosphere has also proved tough going for those viewers who could see it.
Poppo, a teenage girl, is carried by four teenage boys to the roof of an apartment building and raped by them. The next morning, she asks them to kill her, but, instead, they mock her, and one of them rapes her again. Meanwhile, Tsukio, another teenage boy, is watching the rapes passively.
Over the course of a day and a night, Poppo and Tsukio begin a relationship, telling each other of their troubled past and speculating about their fate. Poppo describes an earlier rape (shown in flashback) and tells Tsukio that her parents had killed themselves on separate occasions when she was a child.
In another flashback, Tsukio tells of his own recent sexual abuse by a group of neighbors, all of whom he has stabbed to death.
Poppo repeatedly asks Tsukio to kill her, but he refuses. When the gang returns and again rapes Poppo, Tsukio kills them and their three girlfriends. Poppo follows him complaining that he refuses her request while he was willing to kill the gang.
The story ends with Poppo and Tsukio jumping off the apartment roof to their deaths. Some theorists, like Pieter-Jan Van Haecke, sees the roof as “a metaphor for the societal plane, a symbolic place that, with respect to dealing with traumatized subjects, is a failure.”
David Desser compares the double-suicide with which the film concludes to the shinjū (lovers suicide) in traditional Japanese theatrical forms such as bunraku and kabuki.
Wakamatsu had worked for Nikkatsu studios between 1963 and 1965, where he directed some exploitation films. When his pink film Secrets Behind the Wall ran afoul of the government, Wakamatsu formed his own company. His independent films of the late 1960s were low-budget features, dealing with graphic sex and extreme violence, while also sending political messages.
Some critics have suggested that these films were intentional provocation in order to generate free publicity based on the anticipated censorship controversies. Up to that point, no one had filmed porn with such an overtly political and aesthetic radicalism.
The low budget necessitated on location shooting, single-takes, natural lighting, and black and white cinematography, though Wakamatsu occasionally uses color for theatrical effect.
Like many of Wakamatsu’s films, Go, Go, Second Time Virgin is set mostly in one location–an apartment rooftop–and was shot in four days with a minimal budget.
At one point, Poppo looks directly into the camera and addresses the audience: “My mother was gang raped, and then she gave birth to me. Are the tears we two shed when raped, the tears women shed? What tears? What sadness? I am not a woman. I’m not sad, not sad at all. I don’t cry. I’m never sad. I’m not at all sad…..FUCK YOU..FUCK YOU.”
Writer Masao Adachi, along with Wakamatsu, is responsible for much of Go, Go, Second Time’s thematic, political and stylistic concerns., resulting in a film combining disjunctive New Wave style, existentialist dread, sex, sadism, and gore.
American standards like Gershwin’s “Summertime,” and the traditional spiritual “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child” as well as Patty Waters’ jazz arrangement of “Black Is the Color of My True Love’s Hair” are heard on the soundtrack.
Credits:
Produced, directed by Kōji Wakamatsu
Written by Masao Adachi, Izuru Deguchi, Kazuo ‘Gaira’ Komizu
Starring Michio Akiyama
Mimi Kozakura
Cinematography Hideo Itō
Music by Meikyu Sekai
Distributed by Wakamatsu Productions
Release date; 1969
Running time: 65 minutes
Language Japanese
