This film is part of the Queer 70s season at the Barbican. Full details here.
Japanese cinema expert Tony Rayns has written in more detail about the film here.
Barbican introduction: A wild and violent road trip with a genderqueer partnership
at its centre, Isao Fujisawa’s breathtaking and radical movie was
thought lost until a negative was unearthed in 2018. An exhilarating rush from start to finish, Bye Bye Love begins with a frenzied anti-‘meet cute’. A young woman, referred to as ‘Giko’ (Miyabi Ichijo) flees the cops and barges into a rebellious macho guy, ‘Utamaro’ (Ren Tamura)
whom she implores for help. Soon, a policeman is dead, and the pair
spend the rest of their relationship on the run. Giko is revealed to be
gender fluid and the two forge a queer partnership in crime. While
the depiction of Giko’s identity is inevitably of its time, the
character, unforgettably played by Ichijo, is sympathetic and has a lot
of agency in the film. Bye Bye Love
captures the nihilistic zeitgeist, (a character called Nixon is gunned
down soon after entering the story), looking back on the broken promises
of the 1960s. It’s a thrilling, provocative film, infused with the
energy of early Godard.
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