Controversial film by Japanese Kōji Wakamatsu

Kōji Wakamatsu has been called the most important director in the pink film genre, and one of the most important Japanese directors of the 1960s.

Go, Go, second time virgin
Cover of the December 2000 DVD release

Go, Go, second time virgin is one of Wakamatsu’s best-known films, but discussion of it in English has been hampered by a lack of availability. The relentlessly somber atmosphere also proved difficult for the viewers who were able to see it.

Poppo, a teenage girl, is carried to the roof of an apartment building by four teenage boys 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 teenager, passively watches the rapes.

Over the course of a day and a night, Poppo and Tsukio begin a relationship, telling each other about their troubled pasts and speculating about their fates. Poppo describes a previous rape (shown in flashback) and tells Tsukio that her parents had committed suicide on several occasions when she was a child.

In another flashback, Tsukio talks about his own recent sexual abuse by a group of neighbors, all of whom he stabbed to death.

Poppo repeatedly asks Tsukio to kill her, but he refuses. When the gang returns and rapes Poppo again, Tsukio kills them and their three girlfriends. Poppo follows him and complains that he refuses her request when he was ready to kill the gang.

The story ends with Poppo and Tsukio jumping from the apartment roof to their deaths. Some theorists, such as Pieter-Jan Van Haecke, see the roof as “a metaphor for the social plane, a symbolic place that, when it comes to dealing with traumatized subjects, is a failure.”

David Desser compares the double suicide with which the film ends to the shinjū (suicide of lovers) in traditional Japanese theatrical forms such as bunraku and kabuki.

Wakamatsu had worked for Nikkatsu studios between 1963 and 1965, where he directed several exploitation films. When are pink film Secrets behind the wall clashed with the government, Wakamatsu founded his own company. His independent films of the late 1960s were low-budget features, dealing with explicit sex and extreme violence while also sending political messages.

Some critics have suggested that these films were a deliberate provocation to generate free publicity based on the expected censorship controversies. Until that point, no one had filmed porn with such overt political and aesthetic radicalism.

The low budget required for location shooting, single takes, natural lighting and black and white cinematography, although Wakamatsu occasionally uses color for theatrical effects.

Like many Wakamatsu films, Go, Go, second time virgin takes place largely in one location – on the roof of an apartment – ​​and was shot in four days on 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 the two of us shed when we are raped the tears that women shed? What tears? What sadness? I’m not a woman. I’m not sad, not sad at all. I don’t cry. I’m never sad. I’m not sad at all…..FUCK YOU..FUCK YOU.”

Writer Masao Adachi, along with Wakamatsu, is responsible for much of the thematic, political and stylistic problems of Go, Go, Second Time, resulting in a film that combines a disjointed New Wave style, existentialist fear, sex, sadism and gore.

The soundtrack features American standards such as Gershwin’s ‘Summertime’ and the traditional spiritual ‘Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child’ and Patty Waters’ jazz arrangement of ‘Black Is the Color of My True Love’s Hair’.

Credits:

Produced, directed by Kōji Wakamatsu
Written by Masao Adachi, Izuru Deguchi and Kazuo ‘Gaira’ Komizu
Starring Michio Akiyama
Mimi Kozakura
Cinematography Hideo Ito
Music by Meikyu Sekai
Distributed by Wakamatsu Productions

Release date; 1969

Playing time: 65 minutes
Language Japanese