Fujisawa Rediscovered, Teshigahara Revisited

Ren Tamura and Miyabi Ichijo in Isao Fujisawa’s Bye Bye Love (1974)

Somehow, the sole surviving print of what producer and director Akihiro Suzuki has called “one of the most popular independent films of the 1970s” in Japan was allowed to deteriorate and disappear. For decades, Bye Bye Love (1974), the only fictional feature directed by Isao Fujisawa, who went on to work in television and make documentaries, was considered lost. By happy accident, though, the original negative turned up in a film lab’s warehouse in 2018, and Suzuki has been shepherding a revival ever since.

Fujisawa started out as an assistant director to Hiroshi Teshigahara, working on Woman in the Dunes (1964) and The Face of Another (1966), and starting Friday, New York’s Metrograph will accompany its run of Bye Bye Love with screenings of these two classic adaptations of novels by Kobo Abe. Many have noted that with its playful splashes of red and blue on white and its outlaw lovers-on-the-run storyline, Bye Bye Love is infused with the energy of Jean-Luc Godard’s Pierrot le fou (1965). But its roots in the mid-twentieth-century high modernism of Teshigahara’s work are just as palpable.

In a 2007 piece on the collaborations between Teshigahara, Abe, and composer Toru Takemitsu, Peter Grilli noted that “the three struck a chord that harmonized unexpectedly, but perfectly, with the sensibilities and existentialist instincts of the international avant-garde.” That same year, James Quandt called The Face of Another—starring Tatsuya Nakadai as Mr. Okuyama, who finds that the mask transplanted onto his disfigured visage is blowing any sense of his own identity wide open—“one of those unnerving works that looks both dated and more modern than modern.”

In Woman in the Dunes, an amateur entomologist finds his identity evaporating after he’s trapped and essentially enslaved by dune-dwelling villagers. He fights tooth and nail to maintain it but only finds peace once he lets it go. “For a nation of islands that was unified only by a police state that required a passport to travel from one region to another for nearly three hundred years,” wrote Audie Bock in 2007, “where marriages are consummated after thorough detective-agency investigation of family, health, education, and professional records, where even now an individual’s new address is verified within days by a visit from the policeman from the corner kiosk, the impulse to drop out remains extremely powerful.”

In Bye Bye Love, a footloose fellow (Ren Tamura) calling himself Utamaro—most likely taking on the name of the eighteenth-century woodblock artist—is randomly hitting on women in the street when one practically falls into his lap, desperate for help. He’ll call her Giko (Miyabi Ichijo), and when he kills a cop in the course of her rescue, the two escape to the gaudy apartment where she’s been hanging out lately. It’s owned by an American embassy employee—named Nixon!—and once Utamaro shoots him, too, the two are destined to spend the rest of the movie on the lam.

First, though, Utamaro must discover what any viewer in 2025 already knows. Giko presents as female but was born male. “Playful, anarchic, and unusually prescient, Bye Bye Love feels like a transmission from a gender-queer future that had yet to be defined,” writes Luke Goodsell for Metrograph Journal. “What’s notable about Fujisawa’s lone directorial feature isn’t just that it’s a contemporary outlier, or one that anticipates the transgressive New Queer Cinema road movies of Gregg Araki and Gus Van Sant decades later, but that it features a progressive, empathic perspective on non-binary life. Writer Ren Scateni proposes that Fujisawa’s film also captures ‘both ends of the trans experience: the reassuring euphoria when gender identity and presentation align and the thorny, insidious envy of cisgender people.’”

“I’m confused,” says Giko at one point. “It’s like a love triangle . . . you and the male and female me.” Writing for the BFI, Tony Rayns notes that Utamaro and Giko’s “platonic but close and emotional relationship had no precedent in Japanese cinema.” Throughout Bye Bye Love, Utamaro and Giko trade bleakly aphoristic pronouncements and only one of them is uttered by both, albeit in separate moments: “I’m nobody.” There is an echo here of The Face of Another’s Mr. Okuyama, who murmurs on a crowded street, “I’m no one.”

Reviewing Bye Bye Love for the Village Voice, Michael Atkinson notes that when Godard was once asked why Weekend (1967) had so much blood in it, he replied, “That’s not blood, that’s red.” This “redefinition is key not only to Godard but to the whole slippery blob-of-mercury zeitgeist that followed after him,” writes Atkinson. “Fujisawa’s film plants its flag in the middle of that stream, riffing on the Breathless story flowchart (itself a smirking self-conscious take on a film noir paradigm), pouring on the red paint, wallowing in wasteful downtime, and thumbing its nose at the squares. Which makes it a sprightly time capsule; every imitator of Godard made a film more or less like this, just not with this degree of nonchalant sexual ambiguity, and not in Japan.”

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