Cruel Story of Youth (Seishun zankoku monogatari)

 

Director Nagisa Ōshima

CRUEL STORY OF YOUTH (Seishun zankoku monogatari)         B+                                      aka:  Naked Youth                                                                                                                      Japan  (96 mi)  1960  ‘Scope  d: Nagisa Ōshima

A sexual relationship with another brings about a connection with all humanity: by embracing one person, you are able to embrace all humanity.                                                                       —Nagisa Ōshima

Inspired by the French New Wave, Ōshima was a motivating voice who helped usher in a Japanese New Wave that expressed a disillusionment and cynicism of postwar Japanese youth, which was a sharp break from the films of Akira Kurosawa, Kenji Mizoguchi, Mikio Naruse, and Yasujirō Ozu, whose cinematic aesthetic evoked older Japanese traditions.  Having come from an aristocratic family, supposedly a descendent from a privileged Samurai family, whose father was a government official who kept a large library, but died when he was only 6-years old, so common among Japanese families whose fathers were lost in the Pacific War, the 22-year old Ōshima quit law school yet aced the Shōchiko studios entrance exam and served a five-year apprentice while seething at the dullness and conservatism of the studio’s films, as did the other directors in Japan’s New Wave, including Yoshishige Yoshida, Masahiro Shinoda, and Shōhei Imamura, all forced to adapt to confining rules.  He left Shōchiku in 1961 in protest over the shelving of his politically charged NIGHT AND FOG IN JAPAN (1960), which was pulled from theaters just three days after its release when Japan’s Socialist Party leader, Inejirō Asanuma, was assassinated on live TV in a brutal stabbing during a nationally televised political debate by a right-wing nationalist, with Ōshima forming his own production company Sozosha later that same year.  While his first film, STREET OF LOVE OF HOPE (1959), a bleak melodrama about class conflict, was a commercial failure, only released in a few small theaters, this second film in his Trilogy of Youth (followed by THE SUN’S BURIAL later that same year) is a dark, shocking, and unpleasant crime film about hedonistic teens that proved to be enormously popular with young filmgoers, viewed at the time as scandalous, capturing the height of political turmoil and massive protests against the 1960 renewal of the highly contentious US-Japan Security Treaty of 1951 that allowed U.S. troops to remain in Japan.  The director, along with much of Japan, was profoundly shaken by Japan’s refusal and/or inability to set its own course after the ending of the American occupation, establishing Ōshima as a leading figure in the generation of young filmmakers who rebelled against Japanese cinema’s status quo.  Refusing to appeal to the collective consciousness of the audience, or echo established forms in any way, the auteur Ōshima followed the example of Jean-Luc Godard with an insistence upon bringing a subjective individuality to his filmmaking, making shocking, disruptive films that sent a new message to viewers, focusing on youth crime, abusive relationships, and the struggles of ordinary people, with no scenes involving actors sitting on tatami mats, while businessmen make frequent use of Western style “love hotels” that offer rooms by the hour, literally forcing the audience to break with bonds of tradition.   

Following the military defeat of Japan in WWII, the surrender of the Emperor meant the defeat of the values he represented, throwing the nation into a state of ideological confusion.  The devastation inflicted on many Japanese cities and the massive loss of life led to an equally devastating moral aftermath of the war with the American occupation, which led to sweeping democratic reforms, yet were perceived as empty promises of a new democratic government, as the exoneration of Emperor Hirohito from wartime responsibility and the release of many war criminals back into society left the people of Japan to bear the burden of guilt and responsibility for Japan’s loss, leaving society in a broken state of open despair.  Parents who were affected by the loss felt a sense of powerless resignation, aligning themselves with the postwar capitalistic boom and the recovery of the Japanese economy in the 50’s, yet their children would eventually fight the right wing government in the 60’s and the shallow offerings that materialism could bring.  Like the young guns from Cahiers du Cinéma, Ōshima was also a film critic turned director, adopting the cinematic aesthetics of the French New Wave’s use of handheld cameras and real-life locations, predominately shooting outdoors on this film, while also aligned with the British Angry young men of the 50’s and 60’s (the film was banned in Great Britain, released in a cut version in 1976, finally released uncut in 2008), Ōshima’s film introduced a transgressive element into Japanese cinema that led to more extreme levels of violence and sex in Japanese cinema.  While Ōshima’s most famous film is his sado-masochistic arthouse movie IN THE REALM OF THE SENSES (1976), which drew the wrath of Japanese censorship, causing an international crisis with its daringly provocative sexuality, this is a jarring, unsentimentalized story about the aimless indifference of the rebellious next generation, where the lessons learned from the war, the sacrifices and hard, self-imposed discipline in the reconstruction era of the 50’s are distant memories in the forming of a New Japan.  Ōshima’s film is a blistering social critique of postwar Japan, set against a backdrop of American materialism, leaving behind a moral void, not only rejecting the new militarism on the right but also the failure of the left to offer a viable alternative to the status quo, introducing original newsreel footage of the 1960 student riots in Seoul, South Korea which deposed President Syngman Rhee from power, and also the May Day demonstration in Tokyo, acknowledging contemporary events of the moment, yet his protagonists are apolitical, where this might be called the Japanese version of Nicholas Ray’s Rebel Without a Cause (1955), only one striking difference is the use of unsympathetic lead characters.  An ode to lost youth, where sex and violence are viewed as rebellious expressions of freedom, like a chain link to the past where you can’t break free, doomed to repeat the same mistakes, as the winds of Japanese liberal social change of the 50’s resembles that same anti-establishment movement during the 60’s in America, with an idealized future that never seems to come.  Many of the characters appear to be trapped within an existential crisis and are seen desperately searching for meaning in their lives, with one of the protagonists bleakly asserting, “We have no dreams, so we can’t see them destroyed.” 

Miyuki Kuwano is Mako, an attractive young teenage girl wearing stylish Western clothes who carelessly hitches rides with older men just for the provocative thrill of it, as automobiles are more fun than trains.  But when one middle-aged man sexually assaults her on the street, she is rescued by another stranger, Kiyoshi (Yūsuke Kawazu), a skinny James Dean figure who intervenes and takes the man’s money, though sadly, after a night on the town, they run off to an industrial lumber yard the next day where he rapes her on a tied-together bundle of floating logs after nearly drowning her to guarantee compliance.  After this manhandling, she improbably falls in love with the guy, who remains a brute, slapping her and throwing her around, treating her like a slab of meat.  He’s a disillusioned college student who dropped out, with professors still teaching classes as if the last twenty years of Japanese history had not occurred, creating a cultural amnesia that these disillusioned youths found repugnant, quickly realizing social change was not going to happen.  Initially he was part of the widespread opposition to the revision of the U.S.–Japan Alliance in 1960, viewed as a blatant act of American imperialism, which led to the massive Anpo protests, the largest popular protests in Japan’s history, but he defies student demonstrations as a waste of time and is instead a small-time thug, creating an extortion scam where Mako takes a drive with a middle-aged man while Kiyoshi follows on his motorbike, and when the guy inevitably makes his move on Mako, he’ll be there to pound his face in and steal his money, Cruel Story of Youth (4K restoration) - Japan Cuts 2015 YouTube (1:34).  They attempt to create meaning in their lives by targeting those who represent what they lack—money.  Afterwards they drive his stolen motorbike into the ocean and make love on a beach.  This works fine until Mako gets sick and tired of being a bought and sold woman, where she’s being dangled like a piece of merchandise.  The family reaction is interesting, as the older sister Yuki (Yoshiko Kuga), who was something of a rebellious child in her own right, part of the first wave of postwar student radicals taking part in the protests against the original 1951 Security Treaty, becoming quickly disillusioned, can’t understand why her own parents aren’t more demonstrative about Mako spending the night with a man, or neglecting her studies at high school, something they made a point of doing when she was growing up.  Makoto’s father (Shinjo Masahiro) accepts the fact that times have changed and you can’t simply put your foot down and expect total compliance, as kids don’t listen anymore, declaring “Times were tough after the war, but we had a way of life.  I could’ve lectured you that we were reborn a democratic nation, that responsibility went hand in hand with freedom.  But today what can we say to this child?  Nothing.  I don’t want to tell her not to do this.”  When the older sister tries to intervene, this only pushes Mako into Kiyoshi’s arms, as she moves in with him on the spot.  While there is instant passion between the two, it’s directed inward so all they see is themselves, spending their time living in a dive, drinking in sleazy bars, and getting into fights with pimps who have their eye on the girl, seeing only dollar signs.  Kiyoshi protects her, but rival gangsters continue to lurk in the shadows, keeping their leering eye on the girl.  Meanwhile, Kiyoshi continues to get secret financial help from an older woman Teruko (Toshiko Kobayashi) who gives him money for sexual favors—another operator working behind the scenes.  

In a nod to Westernized intervention, each of the bar scenes features raunchy jukebox music that alternates between bebop jazz and American rockabilly, a complete cultural break from anything used by earlier Japanese filmmakers, who emphasized more traditional Japanese sounds, yet in the same way there is a staggering cut from the lovers’ heated physical exchange to a churning industrial cement mixer, which is a defiant condemnation of the Ozu-style pillow shot and an adept metaphor for the distance between these doomed lovers and the new Japan being built for a burgeoning middle class that excludes them, exchanging one tired, old patriarchal system for another, disguised under the garb of American capitalism, represented by large American cars and the wads of cash the businessmen carry.  Stylistically removed from conventional cinema, the radical use of Technicolor Cinemascope and a telephoto lens in cramped interior scenes further isolates the protagonists from their surroundings, creating a claustrophobic feeling of oppression, portraying the dark side of sexual norms, including exploitation, violence, and subjugation, marked by a theme of masochism found in later Ōshima films, which is especially prevalent in his most controversial film, IN THE REALM OF THE SENSES (1976), forcing the audience to re-think the established concept of social reality by being forced to “re-see” it on the screen, actually heightening the emotional realism of the story.  This dizzying juxtaposition of polar opposites is also reflected in the constantly changing moods between the young lovers, who are emblematic of postwar anxieties, generational malaise, and cultural changes in Japan, caught in a vicious web of violence and destruction, often compared to Godard’s young lovers in Breathless (À Bout de Souffle) (1959), though with a complete absence of romanticism, perhaps best represented by a heartfelt plea from Mako, asking “Why can’t you treat me better?”  She may as well have been asking the same from her embattled nation.  With constant turmoil and bottled-up emotions, this film makes clear just how impossible it was to be an independent-minded Japanese woman in the early 1960’s, reaching its lowest point when she announces her pregnancy and all he can think about is money for an abortion, failing to even consider the possibility of having a future together.  Mako may want to love him, blind to all other possibilities, but it’s here she realizes his vulgar limitations.  In one of the strangest scenes in the film emphasizing his crude ways, Ōshima shows him gulping down an entire apple in real time as he hovers over her still anaesthetized body after the operation, Cruel Story of Youth 1960 / Nagisa Oshima YouTube (1:31).  But these two have no future together, have no real connection to anything at all.  There’s a strange detachment to these characters all along, who are perceived as lives in free-fall, yet we’re as intrigued by their impulsive behavior as we are repulsed by their own crass indifference.  Stuck in a cycle of regret and weary capitulation to their individual fates, Ōshima’s ultimate message is undoubtedly nihilistic, lacking any hope for the future, which can be read as a message that Japanese society was failing to find its own cultural, social, and political identity and can be seen as a call for change and renewal.  As if hatched from an American B-movie, and not distributed in France until 1986, the film is credited with saving Shōchiku studios from bankruptcy during the rise of television and the fall of cinema attendance in Japan, pre-dating many of the much later modern films of youth culture alienation, including nearly all of Hong Kong director Wong Kar-wai’s films, which fill the screen with magnificent neon colors and a pulsating sensuality.  Shot by Takashi Kawamata, the bright colors are garishly out of place (intentionally avoiding the color green, Nagisa Oshima: Banishing Green, so he took great care to exclude trees and shrubs), especially in the industrial wasteland where they wander, featuring industrial noises and documentary style images of massive construction taking place, images evoking the actual building a new society, with Ōshima using long takes, extreme close-ups, distorted angles, and odd geometric shapes to go along with a jittery, handheld camera style where any hopes of equilibrium are skewed by the restless instability of adolescence, where poor decisions and immaturity prevail, portraying a heartless, disconnected world filled with a cold dissonance.   

Seishun Zankoku Monogatari (Cruel Story of Youth) - Review ...  excellent video review (with Engish subtitles) by Italian film critic Adriano Aprà (with spoilers in the last minute or so) on YouTube (8:26)

Cruel Story of Youth (1960) Watch HD - Vídeo Dailymotion entire movie on HD with English subtitles on YouTube (1:36:47)

Fists in the Pocket (I pugni in tasca)

 

Director Marco Bellocchio, 1965

FISTS IN THE POCKET (I pugni in tasca)               A                                                                 aka:  Fist in His Pocket                                                                                                            Italy  (108 mi)  1965  d: Marco Bellocchio

The great advantage of first films is that you're nobody and you have no history, so you have the freedom to risk everything, you have nothing to lose. My name may remain linked to this film above all. The anger that turns into the murder of a mother and a brother was very much in sync with the times and with the things that were exploding and about to explode. The film is actually about the nihilistic fervor of a youth, while the early phase of the post-'68 movement, the one I liked, was libertarian: empowering the imagination, the non-violent challenging of fathers and professors, and so on. Then things changed.

—Marco Bellocchio, Film Comment, January/February 2005

Bellocchio started his career with a middle finger to the status quo, a film so combustible that it has overshadowed the rest of his career.  Detailing the toxic pathology within a languishing bourgeois household, utilizing the techniques of the French New Wave, this film was quite a shock to audiences when it was released, some calling for it to be banned, viewing it as blasphemous, savagely perverse, subversive, or even nihilist, yet the shock it provokes feels like a premonition of unrest, a foreshadowing of the turbulent times of the late 60’s, when leftist politics and revolutionary dreams brought mass demonstrations into the mainstream.  While that may be true, there is also a sentiment that this captures the lingering effects of postwar fascism, with the film representing a rejection of the new normal in Italy, namely the existing complacency, with Bellocchio skewering the institutions of family, marriage, and Catholicism, the very foundations of Italian culture and the mainstays of Italian neorealist cinema.  Rather than present a traditional drama in the neorealist style, he forces viewers to confront a new kind of Italian reality, delving into psychological minefields.  In Italy, as opposed to France or the United States, the 1968 student protests continued on and off for a decade, lingering much longer, as if coming to terms with establishing a new identity.  A remarkably strident film that interestingly bears similarities with Bellocchio’s more recent Vincere (2009), which is a damning exposé on fascism and the hypocrisy shown by Italian strongman Benito Mussolini towards his neglected first wife, locking her and their mutual son in a mental hospital after his rise to power, disavowing all knowledge of their existence.  Forty years apart, both remain Bellocchio’s best efforts, largely due to the starkly unique subject matter and the extraordinary way the director allows each story to unravel.  This is a chamber drama of family dysfunction that could easily be seen as a metaphor for the dysfunction of a paralyzed fascist nation, but takes no steps to develop any political dimension, confining the material to the unusual characters who inhabit this story that at times resembles a bizarre coming of age drama, a bleak satire on the moral hypocrisy of Catholicism and the Italian middle class, and a gothic horror story.  Much like French director Bruno Dumont who shot his first movies in his home town of Bailleul, Bellocchio shoots this film in his home town of Bobbio, a small town in the northern province of Piacenza, actually using his family’s villa where he grew up as the family home in the film, where there are no neighbors or buildings in view, just a deck with an extraordinary view of the distant mountains.  The remote isolation of the home plays a major part of the story, as the family feels cut off from the city and the world around them, confined to a morose life of boredom and despair.  

Perhaps a predecessor to Alex in Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1971), the unhinged family member is Alessandro (Swedish actor Lou Castel as Sandro), a psychotic, self-centered brooder with nothing to do but spend his days bragging openly about his love for his sister and his violent schemes to murder his own family members, to put them out of their misery, who is himself plagued by severe epileptic seizures, popping pills to help alleviate the regularity, who is joined at the hip with his inseparable, near incestuous sister, the drop dead gorgeous Giulia (Paola Pitagora), an aggressively compulsive sexual narcissist who is perfectly willing to plot behind the scenes with her brother.  Only the mother (Liliana Grace), who is blind and can’t see the family cat eating out of her bowl of soup, or the somewhat successful older brother Augusto (Marino Masé), who spends much of his time in town with successful business interests and a girlfriend Lucia (Jeannie McNeil), have anything resembling a normal life.  The youngest, and most ignored, is the barely tolerated, developmentally disabled Leone (Pierluigi Troglio), also plagued by epilepsy, which can be unpredictable and life-threatening.  Both Sandro and Giulia know they are different and don’t fit in, spending plenty of time eyeing themselves in the mirror, outcasts confined to their claustrophobic, prison-like villa outside of town filled with antiques and family portraits on the walls, away from public scrutiny and outside the reach of any existing morality.  Neither feels close to anyone else, and it’s this sense of severe disconnection leading to amoral depravity that pervades every aspect of this film.  Giulia anonymously writes threatening letters to Lucia suggesting there is a pregnant other woman, using letters cut out from magazines like a ransom demand, contending Augusto is merely toying with her affections, while at the same time encouraging and seemingly indulging the incestuous lust of Sandro, who tapes a photo of a young Marlon Brando to her bedpost and writes her love poetry, which, of course, she eagerly shows to Augusto.  Evoking Luis Buñuel’s sense of the violence in upper middle class stagnation and the brutality of elitism, Buñuel was a director revered by Bellocchio, but he publicly dismissed the film, finding it repulsive and disrespectful, condemning it as an exercise in bad taste.  Coming on the heels of Bernardo Bertolucci’s Before the Revolution (Prima della rivoluzione) (1964), both directors broke onto the scene with early films in the 60’s that are extraordinary anti-conformist manifestos that are among the most stunning directorial debuts in movie history, completely altering the landscape of Italian cinema.

Bellocchio outlines the premise, “In Italy, the family is an almost holy institution, a pillar of society, and to criticize it is considered outrageous.”  Castel is extraordinary as a childishly neurotic loose cannon whose constant mood changes become reflective of his demented personality, afflicted with tics and other strange behaviors, where his oddness becomes acceptable behavior within his psychologically repressive family, as that’s what they’re accustomed to seeing, like inventing hideously violent newspaper headlines when reading the paper for his mother, Lou Castel in Fists in the Pocket YouTube (2:47), or his bizarre desire to raise chinchillas, which he quickly forgets, so to them he never stands out as being anything other than peculiar, where his vain acts of selfishness are to be expected.  However it’s his slow descent into madness that sets the tone for the film, as he begins to believe that the practical solution to the family’s problems is to first kill off his mother and then a disabled brother.  Augusto appears to have his faculties intact, where the entire family invests its hopes in him as the sole breadwinner, leaving the others feeling excruciating resentment at being left out, yet he does nothing to stop Sandro from carrying out his murderous intentions, refusing to get involved, becoming silently complicit, yet there’s a wonderful scene illuminated only by car headlights where we see Augusto avidly shooting at scurrying rats.  A scathing indictment of the privileged class, Bellocchio uses quick cuts to demonstrate an anxious state of mind, where Alberto Marrama’s crisp black and white cinematography, by contrast, feels energetically liberated, reflected by his constantly moving camerawork along with the jarring operatic score by Ennio Morricone, creating a disturbingly harsh, unsettling atmosphere reminiscent of horror films.  When Sandro takes his blind mother out for a drive, stopping to get some air as he pushes her off the side of a cliff, the previous slow buildup of meticulous character development takes a sudden turn with a huge emotional payoff, as his mind deteriorates further with Sandro’s brazenly disrespectful behavior, literally dancing over his mother’s coffin.  Sandro and Giulia, are nothing less than giddy when throwing out their mother’s belongings and setting them ablaze, as if she were a dreadful burden they are more than happy to be rid of.  It’s as if the dark, disturbing tone of the film has been suddenly rewired for murder. 

The fatherless family may be an allegorical reference to Italy without Mussolini, where time and time again, Bellocchio stages scenes in front of family portraits, with the past continuously looming over the children, reminding them of a dutiful connection to a helpless mother, but it’s a connection that leads to chaos.  Despite Sandro’s matricide, which he shares with his sister, life goes on exactly as before, where keeping a family secret is a normal part of their lives, as they kept their obvious disgust for their mother to themselves.  Augusto even attempts to reach out to his brother, inviting him to a party of Lucia’s friends in the city, but Sandro remains isolated and alone, even in the company of others, including a persistent woman that asks him to dance with her.  But Sandro resists change, knowing he is a hindrance to his brother’s chances to actually get out of that dreary house, becoming nothing more than a weight to the world, even sleeping with the same prostitute that his brother frequents to incessantly question her about him.  Bellocchio beautifully stages the aftermath of murder in a silent, seething rage, where the psychological presence of death remains in the forefront of both Sandro and Giulia’s thoughts, like a stench in the air they breathe, something they can’t get rid of, with both becoming consumed by the toxic fumes.  The entire fiasco is perhaps best expressed by Leone, who at one point presciently acknowledges, “What torture, living in this house.”  There’s an anxious uneasiness to the restless energy onscreen, personified both by the sociopathic behavior of Castel and the film’s own aesthetic, accentuated by handheld shots, assertively fluid camera movements, and jaw-dropping cuts loaded with ambiguity, as we’re never sure if we’re watching a tragedy or a black comedy.  Exuding in next-level family dysfunction, perhaps the words of the director twenty years later in 1989 offer a clue, “Madness is a form of rebellion, a cry of freedom.”  What’s perhaps most startling is how banal and ordinary Sandro seems, a man with no special qualities, nothing to gain, and no real motive, so his murderous descent seems driven by boredom and indifference, gorgeously realized in the final operatic scene staged to Maria Callas singing Sempre Libera from Verdi’s La Traviata, Maria Callas - "Sempre Libera!" W. Alfredo Kraus (High C ... YouTube (4:51), a fierce, narcissistic anthem to freedom and happiness, where the soaring soprano voice sets the stage for the electrifying finale, a feverish plea for individuality that becomes a Macbethian portrait of terror.    

Free and aimless I frolic
From joy to joy,
Flowing along the surface
of life’s path as I please.
As the day is born,
Or as the day dies,
Happily I turn to the new delights
That make my spirit soar.

Love is a heartbeat throughout the universe,
mysterious, altering,
the torment and delight of my heart.

Oh! Oh! Love!
Madness! Euphoria!

—Sempre Libera, (Always Free) by Giuseppe Verdi from La Traviata, Act I finale, 1853