In 1960, Nagisa Ōshima made three radical films for Japan’s Shochiku Studio, and they fired him. One of those three, Cruel Story of Youth (Seishun Zankoku Monogatari) is now on Criterion. In a bonus as important as the main feature, and in some ways more satisfying, Ōshima’s one-hour debut is thrown in: A Town of Love and Hope (Ai to kibō no machi, 1959). Since his directorial career really begins there, we will too.
A Town of Love and Hope‘s
Humane, Hard-Edged Panorama
The story Nagisa Ōshima wanted to call “The Boy Who Sold His Pigeons” opens on a busy street crowded with people and vehicles. Railroad or tram barriers are continually raising and lowering to regulate everyone’s lives. Looking like ragamuffins, two poor older women crouch side by side offering shoeshines to pedestrians. Beside them is the adolescent Masao (Hiroshi Fujikawa) in a sober school uniform that matches his seriousness. He’s at the in-between stage when he faces the choice of going to high school, as his ill mother hopes, or going to work so she needn’t keep shining shoes. He’s taking her place today, and he’s watching over a cage with two pigeons.
Attracted to the grave handsome boy, the outgoing Kyoko (Yuki Tominaga) stops to chat and buys his pigeons. She’s a high school sophomore from a well-off family. He insists on returning her change, although she tells him to keep it. This is the first sign of the pride he continually must swallow. The old women tell him he was foolish not to keep the money. We’ll soon learn that Masao lives in a decrepit one-room shack with his mother (Yuko Mochizuki) and a little sister (Michiko Ito) who’s “slow” and has a fixation on drawing dead animals.
Like Masao’s mother, Kyoko’s little brother is ill in bed, and the pigeons are a gift for him. He recovers enough to bring one of the birds to school. His teacher, Miss Akiyama (Kakuko Chino), who also happens to be Masao’s eighth-grade teacher, asks if the bird will return home if she releases it out the window. Kyoko’s brother says yes, not thinking that the bird won’t return to his own home but to the home of the boy who sold it.
Here’s the cycle. Masao’s mother keeps telling him to sell the pigeons so they can buy food. Reluctantly, he does so. The birds return and are then sold to someone else. It’s kind of a racket, and it mortifies Masao, especially since his sister keeps crying every time the birds disappear. However, he obeys his mother, who tells him it’s not their fault if the birds get loose from their new owners. The ambiguities of this repetitive transaction and the various things it implies form the moral knot at the center of the film Shochiku decided to call A Town of Love and Hope.
This description conveys very little of what happens in this suspenseful, elegantly shot, sensitively written and played social analysis. We haven’t even mentioned all the characters and their fraught relations. Miss Akiyama and Kyoko both take it upon themselves to make friends with Masao, although he’s reluctant to expose his family’s poverty, and both encourage him to apply for a job at the electronics factory of Kyoko’s father (Fujio Suga) and elder brother, Yuji (Fumio Watanabe), who finds himself drawn to Miss Akiyama.
Ōshima draws the variable relations between his many likable characters, their motives and even their emotional digressions with conviction and sensitivity, not to mention lovely compositions and graceful panning shots. A Town of Love and Hope is a humanist canvas, albeit a very tough one. It’s not without the hope mentioned in the title, but clearly nothing will be easy for Masao, and it’s worse for the pigeons. Miss Akiyama has been a persistent force who realizes that people are trapped in their positions, perhaps like the pigeons, making it difficult to see beyond their own values and viewpoints into the lives of others.
Shot in beautiful widescreen black and white, A Town of Love and Hope uses its kaleidoscope of characters to fill out a social canvas reminiscent of a 19th Century novel by Balzac, Zola, or Trollope, or John Sayles’ densely packed films of the 1980s and ’90s, one of which was called City of Hope (1991), yet it’s all over in an hour and puts many longer social dramas to shame.
Cruel Story of Youth As Dark, Dissolute Diorama
The modest commercial and critical success of A Town of Love and Hope encouraged Shochiku to let Ōshima move on to his next project, a violent and sexy youth drama that proved surprisingly popular at home and abroad, helping to define a Japanese New Wave of hip young directors and topics. Like its predecessor, Cruel Story of Youth prefers to understand rather than judge its young protagonists, instead reserving its judgments for the social structures that define them.
Both films are widescreen, but Cruel Story of Youth adds bright colors to the palette while telling a much harsher, even nihilistic story. Fate is located in character, but character, as per the naturalist tradition, is determined by social place.
Also like A Town of Love and Hope, Cruel Story of Youth opens on a busy street, this time at night. Makoto (Miyuki Kawano) is a high school girl with a puffy Jackie Kennedy coiffure. She and a chum hitch a ride home with a stranger, and we’re graced with a widescreen composition of the backs of three heads as framed by the world outside the windshield while the girls declare that hitching rides with strange men is better than riding the bus. Well.
After the friend exits at her house, the middle-aged driver tries to put the moves on Makoto and, for his trouble, gets beaten by tall handsome Kiyoshi (Yusuke Kawazu), who arrives suddenly like a surly chevalier. This first of many fights is presented in jerking handheld closeup that conveys the impression of random grappling rather than clear, cathartic fight choreography. For the record, the way this sequence appears in the trailer is radically different from how it appears on screen.
The would-be rapist threw bloody money on the ground as he fled. Kiyoshi walks Makoto home and is introduced to her suspicious older sister, Yuki (Yoshiko Kuga). Jarringly, Cruel Story of Youth cuts to black and white newsreels of students rioting in Korea as a sign of the times. This footage is playing in a cinema where Kiyoshi was supposed to meet Makoto the next day, but he shows up late and they witness a similar street protest right in front of them. This refers to ripped-from-the-headlines turmoil of protests of the US-Japan Security Pact, an era-defining element to which Ōshima will refer in other films.
Then, in a sequence both lyrical for its majestic overhead photography and disturbing for its content, the young couple visits a waterfront of floating timber, where our supposed knight-errant pushes Makoto in the water when she doesn’t put out and keeps treating her badly until he has his way with her. In short, he treats her more or less as the previous night’s masher, assuring her that she’s curious about men and sex.
During the violent act, the camera jumps to an image of the sun blazing overhead. More than stylistic discretion or sexual symbolism, it’s a nod to Japan’s contemporary pop-culture trend known as taiyozoku or “sun tribe”, in which perceived amoral youth burned their wings. There was a slew of such films, and Ōshima’s is among the most famous.
Afterwards, Kiyoshi swims nude, presented discreetly but consistently with the manner adopted throughout Cruel Story of Youth that presents his body as erotic object. His physicality is always emphasized in messy fights, in sex, or just when he’s standing around smoking. All women give him the eye, and all men want to kick his guts. Everyone wants a piece of him.
In Japanese culture, at least at the time, “nice” girls weren’t supposed to have desires or want sex unless they were prostitutes, so rape was an unfortunately common strategy in films introducing women to sex. In a bonus interview, historian Tony Rayns touches on this. As we’ll soon learn, Kiyoshi’s attitude to sex is determined by his own sex work as a prostitute or gigolo for middle-aged women in “love hotels”, as shown in another sequence that fairly drools, like his client, over the smoking supine lad.
As Makoto and Kiyoshi flatly declare their love for each, the plot of Cruel Story of Youth spins into “outlaw couple” territory via Romeo and Juliet. If you guess that it ends badly for them, you may be right. Another filmmaker than Nagisa Ōshima would have handled this material with noble sentiments, but we must understand that its disillusioned lovers can only see themselves as best they can, while the compositions, photography and editing present them as case studies in a diorama of stylistic panache. Takashi Kawamata’s cinematography specializes in lengthy tracks and handheld pans, even when the activity is hectic.
Nagisa Ōshima Strikes Out – On His Own
Tony Rayns states that all four of Ōshima’s Shochiku films should really be seen together. Sadly, we get only the first two here and I suppose we can hope the next two are on the way. The Sun’s Burial (Taiyō no Hakaba, 1960) is another downbeat study of hopeless youth and the “sun tribe” trend. It feels like a spiritual sequel or extension of Cruel Story of Youth. Chris Fujiwara’s liner notes on the disc further discuss the “sun tribe” and New Wave films.
For my money, Ōshima’s apotheosis at Shochiku is the film that finally ended his career there when the studio pulled it from cinemas after only a few days, Night and Fog in Japan (Nihon no Yoru to Kiri, 1960). Like A Town of Love and Hope, this devastating critique is truly Japanese and iconoclastic. On paper, it sounds like the dullest story possible: surly guests interrupt a wedding of college radicals and everyone talks about what went wrong with “the movement”, falling into blame and exculpation.
The drama is nothing but politically overheated characters hashing and rehashing, not addressing dialectics so much as why political movements collapse into dissent and dogmatism. Through it all, the camera restlessly pans and tracks. Virtually every scene feels like a single sinuous take, all nested within each other as flashbacks circle back on themselves to the same moments and images. The result is heady and intoxicating, a talkathon as visual tour de force.
The masterpiece that is Night and Fog in Japan looks forward to Ōshima’s wonderful The Ceremony (Gishiki, 1971), which takes place at several family gatherings over a period of time and mixes similar political and personal topics. I believe The Ceremony is among those films that make more sense if you understand one of the main characters as being in the closet. Ōshima would deal with that subject directly in his last film, Taboo (Gohatto, 1999), but perhaps we digress.
I can’t explain why Ōshima’s Shochiku bookends, A Town of Love and Hope and Night and Fog in Japan, aren’t more famous and celebrated than the two violent sexy titles in between. Or maybe I can. Still, these bookends are the higher achievements, and now you can see at least one of them easily.
After his stint at Shochiku, Nagisa Ōshima became the most famous and revered independent filmmaker in Japan. He created a string of important, provocative films, almost none of which are easily available in Region 1. Criterion’s Blu-ray of Cruel Story of Youth joins their previous discs of Death by Hanging (Koshikei, 1968), In the Realm of the Senses (1976) and Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence (1983) as the only films of this world-class master to be currently in print in Region 1.
You can whistle for the others, although Criterion’s Eclipse sub-label did release a box of five DVDs, Ōshima’s Outlaw Sixties, back in 2010. Good luck finding a copy. Perhaps this edition of Cruel Story of Youth, which combines Blu-ray and 4K UHD discs in one package, heralds more releases to come.