Three small-town high-school pupils come to Tokyo to take university entrance exams. In the examination hall they find their collective thoughts straying to sexual fantasies about one of the female students nearby. They express their own sense of hopelessness and their cynicism towards the ′idealism′ of their parents′ generation by singing bawdy songs. But the transgressive power of the songs is deflated when they hear a Korean-Japanese girl undergraduate singing the lament of a ′comfort woman′ forced into prostitution for the Japanese army in the colonial period. At their final session with the university examiners they imagine strangling the rich girl they previously fantasised about - while hearing a lecture on the theory that the Japanese race originated in Korea. This remarkable patchwork of dreams, realities and stream-of-consciousness monologues was made without a formal script; each scene was discussed with the writers and actors as shooting proceeded. The star, Araki Ichiro, was a singer well-known for a very public elopement and marriage - and for walking out of the production of a TV film directed by Imai Tadashi. (Tony Rayns)