Returning to fiction film-making after a 13-year absence, Nagisa Oshima has overcome the handicap of a stroke (which left him partially paralyzed) and made one of his purest, saddest and most beautiful films. Carefully balanced between historical fact and emotional truths, Gohatto reworks a theme dear to Oshima for over thirty years: the incompatibility of individual passions and social rules and regulations. Newcomer Ryuhei Matsuda plays a new recruit into the Shinsen-gumi, a Kyoto samurai militia of the 1860s, notorious for its ruthless violence, its secret overthrow of its own founder -- and its homosexuality. Many in the barracks would like to share the beautiful boy′s futon, perhaps even including the leader Kondo (played by Korean Japanese director Yoichi Sai) and his deputy Hijikata (′Beat′ Takeshi). Being an object of universal desire, though, turns the boy into an expert manipulator of the emotions of those around him. (Tony Rayns)