Thanks for a backhanded compliment, but it's not "total recall." Makavejev was one of the directors whose films I saw and found intriguing as an undergrad. His films were not widely released in Japan until 1989, but when they came out, several cinema journals extensively discussed his works (one of which I brought with me to the States), so _WR_ isn't that obscure for Japanese cinephiles.
I thought that Doug might find _WR_ interesting in that it is, in part, a critique of a particular attempt to reconcile Marx and Freud, made from a perspective that still honors both traditions (though not uncritically). It is also a film that says that neither the Socialist Revolution nor the sexual revolution of the 60s liberated women -- hence the portrayals of the death of Milena (the Yugoslav character who issues an impatient and impassioned call for Total Emancipation Here and Now) by beheading and of the involution of counter-culture in the USA. The film also asks: what does it mean to "liberate" sex? Its style and content seem alert to the problem of repressive tolerance, desublimation without emancipation, and show affinities with Foucault's criticism of the repressive hypothesis. The film's tone is farcical, grotesque, and tragic at the same time -- it's deliberately bathetic, in keeping with its parodic appropriation of mass cultures, American, Soviet, and Yugoslav.
Yoshie