This movie has something incredible. The fastness. We are put, since the first scenes, in a crazy mood made of hunger rather than satisfaction. And this hunger is the one of a rapist.
Eisuke, the "demon of noon" is a serial sexual abuser that, as we witness from the first minutes, tries to put his hands of fury over a young girl called Shino, a waiter who lives in Kansai. Far from her native village in Nagano prefecture from which the "demon" belongs too. Before moving, however, Shino used to have sex with Genji the son of the village master in which she used to live. The reason was escaping from poverty after a flood that destroyed almost all the house of the place they both belong to. The hunger of the girl became so the reason she slept with him. However, he really liked her. So this leaded to a double suicide of love. The Japanese call it "shunji" and could have been a traditional element for a classic plot. But Oshima is an innovator. In fact, Genji, liked by a shy village school teacher called Matsuko, is the only one to die. Shino was escaped and raped by Eisuke, the demons that here makes his first crime. So we realize that Shino was raped twice. Matsuko, rather than feel lost, is more and more attracted by Eisuke, and Shino, after the second rape, decides to inform her the real identity of the demon. The problem is that Matsuko and Eisuke are now a married couple. The teacher, is shy as ever, but this happens only on the surface. And, in Japan especially, not every time to appear means to be. We discover she is so much attracted by his violent and beastly drunk husband to avoid to help the girl. However, at one point, she decides to help but, after the death condemn to Eisuke, to end her days in a double suicide with Shino. They did it but Shino another time survives.
Explaining the plot here is necessary to understand the themes of a story completely untidy made of flashbacks and close ups that seem trying to show us the inner soul of the characters. This is given by the fact that this plot evolves under the skins. Under the surface. Even if the violence occurs at noon. Here Matsuko is not a wife as Ozu could have imagined. Here we have a demon that lies under her as well as the characters of Nomura's movies. The forest, however, as the idea of the sun as heat rather than light, is a theme yet developed in Kurosawa's Rashomon where we have, as in this movie, a generally hidden act that lies under the sun and not surrounded by fog.
Another thing very important is the political message behind this work. Even id we are not in a move like "Night and fog of Japan" where this element is stressed more we can consider the two dead victims, Genji and Matsuko, the real couple of "shunji". They, being both pure before the flood, somehow loved each other but were attracted by the flesh and instincts after the order was destroyed. Eisuke is the tool that, creating the chaos, can show us this. As well the easiness that makes Shino living without caring too much about, not only her liar soul, but also her violated body. She concerns only about the goal. That is eating after the starvation. As the postwar Japan did in front of the bombings by the Americans while old officers were killing themselves. The hunger, if reaches a goal, so not as happens with Eisuke, who feels a thirsts of passions, can be justified. And Shino wins as Japan did.
