Gushing Prayer

It’s hard to find a film this year which so adequately illustrates last year’s slogan ‘Free Radicals’ as does Adachi Masao’s Gushing Prayer. It is an outrageous combination of counterculture and pinku eiga, wildly shot in gorgeous black-and-white cinemascope, and, like Wakamatsu Koji’s Go, Go Second Time Virgin (1969) which Adachi scripted, radical, subversive and culture-pessimistic.
Yasuko, Yoko, Koichi and Bill are high school freshmen who engage in group sex to find out the reasons for their dissatisfaction and desensitization. They want to discover how they can ‘beat’ sex and therefore win against adult society. When 15-year-old Yasuko, who has got pregnant, tells her classmates that she has slept with their teacher, she is accused of betrayal and of breaking their vow not to have sex just for pleasure. Yasuko declares that she has felt something only because she prostituted herself. In order to confirm whether this is true, and encouraged by her peers, Yasuko becomes a prostitute and sets out on a self-exploring journey. When she locks herself in a hotel room and decides to kill herself, suddenly her teacher and Koichi show up. Interspersed with actual suicide notes and employing several alienation effects, Gushing Prayer is a penetrative allegory of the political dissatisfaction and spiritual void after the failed 1960s student movement. (EH)

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