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)

Zero Focus (Zero no shôten) (1961)

 

Director Yoshitarô Nomura

author Seichō Matsumoto

screenwriter Shinobu Hashimoto

ZERO FOCUS (Zero no shôten)          B+                                                                                  Japan  (95 mi)  1961  ‘Scope  d: Yoshitarô Nomura

sagging clouds
alone facing
the raging waves
I feel sadness
first trip to Noto

—Seichō Matsumoto poem carved into a stone near the Yase Cliff (Yase no Dangai) on the Noto Peninsula, Matsumoto Seicho's "Zero Focus" and Noto 

Not your ordinary Japanese film, a mix of a slow-burning character study and a tense psychological thriller, this is arguably the most overtly film noir style of all of Nomura’s films, one of eight films the director made adapting the works of Seichō Matsumoto, an Akutagawa Prize-winning author in 1952 and the consummate crime fiction writer in Japan with more than 450 crime stories, where his works tend to focus on the minute details of crimes and the impact they had on society.  Perhaps because Japanese government censors banned detective novels during the war, declaring them unpatriotic, Matsumoto got a late start writing in his early forties, becoming Japan’s highest paid writer, politically left-leaning and popular with Japanese audiences, but his downbeat novels were emblematic of the postwar pessimism in the turbulent years following atomic annihilation, foreign occupation, and waning nationalism.  Taut and tightly constructed, the screen adaptation is co-written by Yōji Yamada, a director in his own right, maker of THE TWILIGHT SAMURAI (2002), and Shinobu Hashimoto, a frequent collaborator with Akira Kurosawa, including RASHOMON (1950), IKIRU (1952), and SEVEN SAMURAI (1954), writing more than 80 screenplays, where this has a distinct literary style with existential voiceovers and duplicitous characters, mixing an underlying Hitchcockian sense of dread with postwar Japanese social commentary, evolving into a multi-layered, convoluted plot taking us down a rabbit hole of intrigue and shocking revelations, each one drawing us into this labyrinthian flashback structure that grows ever more unhinged.  Notable for its use of three women as the lead protagonists, very much ahead of its time in that regard, especially for crime thrillers, probably the most women-centered noir you’ll ever see, described as feminist noir, as it simply was not done at the time, especially in the paternalistic Japanese society.  The son of a silent film director Hōtei Nomura, the still mostly unheralded Nomura may be one of Japanese cinema’s best kept secrets, working as an assistant director for Kurosawa on The Idiot (Hakuchi) (1951) and spending his entire career for the Shochiku film studio.  Japanese noir has a very distinct sensibility, with shifting values of modernism, including the postwar American occupation, skeptical views of progress as well as ambivalent views of the past, existential angst and paranoia, a fatalistic sense of doom, with a reevaluation of social and gender roles for those struggling on the margins.  In this film, prostitution is an underlying theme, but barely touched upon, focusing instead on the psychological ramifications, where there is an effort to transform one’s life from the cruel realities of the past, but reintegration into mainstream society proves more difficult than it seems.  Mizoguchi’s OSAKA ELEGY (1936) was one of the first critiques of gender issues, examining the darker side of sex workers (the director’s older sister was sold into prostitution when he was a child), realistically exploring a young woman’s victimization and descent into prostitution, while Kurosawa’s STRAY DOG (1949) takes noir in a new direction with a police procedural in the ruins of postwar Tokyo, utilizing a near documentary style where the camera moves fluidly through crowded streets, following a detective through Tokyo’s poverty-ridden streets for one entire reel without any dialogue, capturing the physicality of the people, the style, the mood, especially the heat, contrasted against Western influences, the introduction of a gun, baseball, white suits, dancing girls, the blues, jazz, and classical music, with Kurosawa training his eye on Japanese postwar corruption.  This film explores the trauma Japanese women had to endure following the country’s defeat in WWII mixed with revelations of corruption and prostitution during the American occupation, where rampant poverty and limited options forced some into prostitution, having to work very hard to escape that shameful past, which could prove tragic if it becomes known, where a panicked fear eventually leads to murder and suicide.  This gritty black and white noir is the first of two film versions, as a color adaptation was released nearly 50 years later by Isshin Inudo in 2009.

The question of how much we really know about our married partner is a popular device in thriller fiction, bringing comparisons to Hitchcock and his films such as Rebecca (1940) and Suspicion (1941), but this film also draws heavily from Vertigo (1958), accentuating a psychological hysteria that is further exaggerated by the swirling music of Bernard Hermann, while here it is a similarly provocative musical score by Yasushi Akutagawa, known primarily for his films with Kon Ichikawa.  Merging Japanese social realities with the pictorial and symbolic qualities of Japanese landscapes, it’s hard to think of another film that utilizes a steep cliff overlooking a swirling ocean below as well as this one does, described by local police as a beautiful natural vista, but also a popular spot for suicides.  At the center of the story is Teiko, Yoshiko Kuga, who worked with Kurosawa, Mizoguchi, Naruse, Ōshima, and Ozu, a Tokyo woman who is seen at the outset getting happily married to a man ten years older than her, a very successful advertising executive, Kenichi (Kōji Nanbara), supposedly the man of her dreams, though they met through a centuries-old family tradition of Miai, which is more of a suggested rather than arranged marriage, with representatives from his company singing his praises at the wedding, where they appear to have a very happy life ahead of them.  As he’s been promoted to the head office in Tokyo, he takes a short business trip to the offices in coastal Kanazawa to finalize his business dealings there and arrange for his new successor, Zero Focus (1961), directed by Yoshitaro Nomura. #film ... TikTok (2:41), but as the days pass, to her dismay he never returns.  Neither the company nor the police have any idea what has happened to him, but lacking any sense of urgency, she decides to search for him on her own, at first with the help of his employer, but eventually on her own, bringing with her a pair of old photographs she found among his things, but little else to go on, uncovering a series of unexplained deaths and sham suicides as well as a mountain of details that suggest he was living a double life, circumstances not even his co-workers knew about.  Assuming the role of private detective, the more she learns, the less she knows about him, as she searches for clues among a web of lies and deceit that shroud a secret life he was leading, traveling to the western provinces, where it quickly changes to deep snow, which falls relentlessly, but you never know what’s buried underneath, turning even more somber when Kenichi’s brother Sotaro (Kō Nishimura) also intervenes and investigates on his own, but things quickly go awry.  Yet what stands out are the uniqueness of the locations, including a gorgeous seaside route along the railway, with stops at the Hakui Station and the Sanmiyo Station (discontinued in 1972), with breathtaking footage of the coast up to the Noto Peninsula on the rugged north Japan sea coast, which was also featured in Shōhei Imamura’s final film WARM WATER UNDER A RED BRIDGE (2001) and also Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Maborosi (Maboroshi no hikari) (1995), a film that also deals with a missing husband and has many visual parallels.  In what is essentially a whodunit, she is dumbfounded to discover the exact same locations as the photographs, one of which is Kanazawa Castle in the snow, while the other is a small wooden house along a barren, windswept coast in a desolate, economically backward region, with dilapidated houses still built largely out of wood and in many respects unchanged since ancient times, with a high wall of fortified sticks built to keep out both the water and the wind, where the community is sketched out with an almost documentary detail, discovering hidden meanings layered underneath, yet perhaps the most unique aspect is the continued use of voiceovers to express her changing state of mind, filled with unanswered questions, where the mystery only deepens.

This film is like a puzzle box with hidden storage spaces that require intensive brainpower to unlock, as the deeper we get into this moody, atmospheric journey the more difficult it becomes to comprehend, where the real beauty is the secluded location of the windswept Noto Cliff, which frames the dizzying climax, surrounded by an omnipresent dark and dreary, yet tempestuous sea gushing below that recalls Grigori Kozintsev's HAMLET (1964), shot mostly on location in beautifully composed ‘Scope by Takashi Kawamata, where the bleak final act is given a grandiose and surreal stage for such high-wire emotional histrionics, delving into the ever-deepening mystery surrounding Kenichi’s secret life and disappearance.  Adding to this unique theatricality is the dizzyingly exaggerated, Lady Macbethian performance of Sachiko (Hizuru Takachiho), the wife of a wealthy industrial magnate, Mr. Murota (Yoshi Katō), a friend of Kenichi, yet what’s intimated is a much earlier relationship, as in 1950 the missing husband used to be a street cop in Tachikawa near the American occupied airbase when Sachiko was working as a prostitute catering to American soldiers, something she has kept concealed all this time, yet it’s a past that she cannot escape, which is a classic noir theme.  The things that people will do to keep their secrets from being exposed is uncanny, and Sachiko is involved in multiple levels of dirty dealings that the police have erroneously determined were either accidental deaths or suicides.  The degree to which the police are clueless is a bit mindboggling, but the only one savvy enough to actually uncover the interconnectedness and underlying motives behind all these disappearances is Teiko, whose relentless investigation puts her life in danger, as everyone else who came remotely close to unraveling these mysteries ended up dead, so the fact she’s standing precariously close to the edge of a cliff feels more than a little ominous.  Of course the music only amps up the tension, unleashing waves of explosive revelations that grow stranger by the minute.  While we were led to believe that it was Kenichi who was the enigma, Sachiko is a powderkeg of hidden secrets that take this in an entirely different direction, becoming a feminist examination of the postwar predicament for women, many forced into unwanted sexual relationships, as though they were mere objects, denied any feeling of humanity.  This is the essence of the Japanese noir modern woman, an unsettling figure outside the conventions and traditions of marriage and family, existing on the margins of society, expressing individuality and independence by means of a self-imposed isolation, often resorting to and relying upon their exposure to criminality to find their way out of what they perceive as life-threatening situations.  Few films convey a dire sense of desperation like this one, as if a noose has already been placed around Sachiko’s neck, suffocating not only from the choices she’s made but the consequences that come from their exposure, shown in a flurry of flashback sequences that unravel with differing RASHOMON-like interpretations.  Teiko is the lead protagonist, but Sachiko is a mystery woman/femme fatale who becomes an avenging angel of death, while yet another woman from the past surfaces, Hisako (Ineko Arima), a reception girl of the agency’s Kanazawa branch, who turns out to be Kenichi’s common-law wife, and is equally mystified by his strange disappearance, yet she and Sachiko have similar pasts, where the three women are drawn together into the precarious final moments that only grow more melodramatically delirious.  It’s a dense and often confounding film that requires plenty of subtitling, as it’s a whirlwind of rapidly changing events, each with their own deeply unsettling conundrums that have been buried under the surface, finally coming to light.