Gakuryu Ishii has lost the plot. In the opening minutes of his latest movie, filmed at the Kobe university from which he retired last month, his students rush to his office to find their professor with a gun in his mouth. He turns the weapon on them and fires — it’s a prop! — then ducks out the window, leaving behind a stash of idiosyncratic teaching materials and a message scrawled on his computer desktop: “I can’t stand this anymore!”
You may find yourself thinking the same thing during the 165-minute “Self-Revolutionary Cinematic Struggle.”
Ishii’s career has been anything but conventional, yet he’s never made a film quite as experimental and confounding as this: a sprawling treatise on art and self-actualization packaged in a student movie that’s badly in need of a haircut.