Customer Reviews

Cruel Story of Youth [VHS]

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A tale of post-nuclear tension in modern Japan set in the late fifties, Cruel Story of Youth, a rare film that successfully combines beautiful images and an intelligent provacative story of extortion, abortion, modern love and a society struggling to keep up with it all. Director Oshima uses color and sound unlike any other director I have seen. For being such an old film, the vivid juxtapostion of youth with loud rich color and distoted sounds still holds up far better than most films produced today. This contoversial tale about a pair of rebel teen lovers in post-war japan is akin to Rebel Wihout a Cause but with far more guts. This rarely seen film is a must see for anyone interested in great film making.

To live is no possible any more. The second film by Oshima, beautiful and untra violent, the film was made in 1960, the portrait of a lost generaton after the atomic bomb, none of the japanese film makers, even Tsukanoto, is able now to remake the immense terror into the atmosphere. One of the best movies of all times.

After releasing his debut film Street of Love and Hope in 1959, Oshima would be quick to release three films in quick succession in 1960: Cruel Story of Youth, Burial of the Sun, and Night and Fog in Japan. While such output might make one think that the end results of the films might be a bit shoddy due to the hastiness in their creation, in fact all three of the films are important films not only within the realms of Oshima's filmic work, but for Japanese new wave cinema as a whole.

Oshima began 1960 with a bang when Cruel Story of Youth was released. A genre film, fully embedded within the late 1950s, early 1960s tradition of youth films or Sun Tribe films made popular by directors Masamura Yasuzo and Nakahira Ko, Cruel Story of Youth goes beyond its formulaic groundings to be a film that has strong political underpinnings.

Cruel Story of Youth opens with its female protagonist Makoto, Mako for short, and her friend Yoko attempting to hitch a ride home with a middle-aged man. Things turn sour after Yoko is dropped off when the man tries to take Mako to a hotel. Not having that, the man attempts to use physical violence to get what he wants, but Mako is "saved" by a student named Kiyoshi. Mako feels indebted to Kiyoshi and even begins to feel affection for him, but instead of allowing their relationship to grow, Kiyoshi rapes her after a cruel scene in which submerged Mako is not allowed to get out of the water by Kiyoshi. Instead of not wanting anything to do with Kiyoshi again or reporting the rape to the police, Mako instead falls completely in love with Kiyoshi and soon stays out every night with him much to the chagrin of her elder sister Yuki and her spineless father. Her promiscuity and general attitude get her thrown out of the house, so she moves into the dump Kiyoshi lives in. However, with little money between them, they rely on extortion to support themselves, but how long can they exist in such a way?

One of the most interesting elements concerning Cruel Story of Youth is the offhand way the student movement is mentioned in the film. 1960 marks the year that the United States and Japan were to resign the Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security between the United States and Japan which would not only keep the U.S. military in Japan, but strengthen the Japanese Self Defense Forces. Many students were terrified of the remilitarization of Japan because of the destruction Japan had faced just a few years earlier and because they were worried that Japan would be nothing more than a pawn in America's aggression towards the Soviet Union and mainland China. Through protest they hoped they could make a difference and often looked to South Korea as an example of how protest could truly change things, the removal of Yi Seungman, which Oshima supports by having actual South Korean news footage in the film. However, Mako and Kiyoshi care not for revolution, but instead care for sex and money. Oshima is not criticizing this vapidity, because he too had been part of the student movement in the early 1950s which accomplished little of what it set out to do, so he was bitter like Yoko and her doctor friend. He instead sees it as the sad state of modern Japan where the government and conservative ideals quash hopes of real change.

In the film's chaotically fragmented and disorienting opening sequence, an over-animated, carefree adolescent student named Makoto (Kuwano Miyuki) recklessly runs up alongside a series of randomly selected vehicles caught in traffic and uses her disarming joviality to engage the unsuspecting driver into a polite, subtly flirtatious conversation before to attempting to ingratiate herself into obtaining a free ride home. However, as the anonymous driver soon diverts his automobile from the familiar main roads and onto the obscured, seedier alleys leading to the tawdrily ornamented love motels of the city's pleasure quarters, complacency turns to anxiety as the instinctually sobered Makoto demands the driver to pull over the side of the road and hurriedly begins to walk away before being captured and overpowered by her unrelenting aggressor. A passerby dressed in a student uniform named Kiyoshi (Kawazu Yusuke) witnesses the violent encounter and immediately comes to the aid of the young woman. Having beaten and effectively subdued the middle-aged driver, Kiyoshi begins to coerce the humiliated offender into accompanying him to the police station in order to report the crime. In a desperate bid to stave off public embarrassment and avoid certain prosecution, the man attempts to buy Makoto and Kiyoshi's silence with a handful of money, a momentary diversion that allows him to wrest free from Kiyoshi and escape. But Makoto's circumstances would prove to be equally vulnerable as her rescuer now exploits the opportunity to violate the young woman (in a dysfunctional interrelationship that would be similarly revisited in Oshima's subsequent film, Violence at Noon). Traumatized by the incident and conflicted about Kiyoshi's subsequent behavior, Makoto becomes convinced that she has fallen in love with her savior and, following a disapproving lecture by her sister Yuki (Yoshiko Kuga), impulsively decides to move in with the penniless student whose circumstances, unbeknownst to the naïve young woman, includes receiving continued financial support in exchange for sexual services from a wealthy, older woman and renting his room out to friends for their occasional afternoon trysts. Estranged from the watchful gaze of her concerned and protective - but enabling - family, Makoto soon discovers that liberation, too, has a cost as Kiyoshi, emboldened by the unexpected financial windfall resulting from the driver's guilt-ridden attempt to buy off his transgression, decides to turn the fateful incident into a profitable scam by reenacting the scenario with other seemingly well-to-do businessmen (with Kiyoshi opportunely following behind on a borrowed motorcycle) as the lovers' lead a life of desperate, thrill seeking abandon.

Deeply rooted in the dynamic sociopolitical climate of post-occupation Japanese society, Cruel Story of Youth is a stylistically bold, incisive, and provocative examination of hopelessness, victimization, apathy, exploitation, and cultural alienation. From the early image of an international newsreel footage illustrating the April 19, 1960 student uprising in Korea (a contemporary reference and specificity that is also suggested in the newsprint background of the jarring, red painted title sequence) that segues to a shot of the young lovers as literal bystanders at a protest march against the U.S.-Japan Security Pact, Nagisa Oshima draws, not only an implicit contrast between the idealism and impassioned activism of the student protestors and the nihilism and self-gratification of the aimless lovers, but also reflects on the ambivalent (and increasingly invasive) role of the U.S. in Japan's road to post-occupation self-government. It is interesting to note that the committed (albeit perhaps naïve) ideology and sense of purpose embodied by the student activists is also hinted through the shared history of Makoto's sensible and emotionally hardened sister Yuki and her former suitor Akimoto (Fumio Watanabe) - now a struggling (and equally disillusioned) physician who subsidizes his income by performing abortions - that serves as a representation of Oshima's own generation. Oshima further illustrates the film's underlying theme of cultural rootlessness through recurring episodes of Makoto's hitchhiking requests to be driven home (a seemingly elusive destination that invariably ends up in dark, dead-end alleys), the couple's own absence of generational families (perhaps, from self-imposed exile), and the rotating series of couples who rent Kiyoshi's room for their indiscreet liaisons that constantly flout the bounds of private home and public space. (Note the indelible image of an eerily tranquil and disconnected, almost surreal floating log "world" as a brash Kiyoshi violates Makoto, visually reflecting her profound isolation and emotional ambivalence towards Kiyoshi's betrayal). In the end, it is through this collective sentiment of failed idealism, transience, and profound disconnection that Akimoto's illicit, opportunistic, and reprehensible occupation can be seen, not only as a societal symptom of a lost generation's aimlessness and moral bankruptcy (and lost innocence), but also as the metaphoric desire of a wounded national psyche to erase the unwanted legacy of a forced, and violative, union: to regain sovereign pride and self-determination after a protracted history of a seemingly benevolent - but ultimately embittering and culturally traumatic - imposed external will.

The title of this film is so completely fitting. It is indeed a "Cruel Story of Youth" ("Seishun Zankoku Monogatari.") It is often billed as Japan's "Rebel Without a Cause," and this can be seen on a superficial level, that of a good girl from a good family meeting a bad boy from the wrong side of the tracks. However, James Dean had the proverbial heart of gold, whereas Yusuke Kawazu is filled only with rage and disgust.

Director Nagisa Oshima brings the same hard honesty that he brought to his infamous films "In the Realm of the Senses" and "Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence." The setting is the first generation born to post-War Japan. The elder generation, crushed in spirit from the defeat, does not feel qualified or confident offering moral standards to this new generation. They don't understand each other, the youths having never experienced the hardships of the war. With no moral education, and lacking any sort of guidance from their parents, the children pass dangerously into teenage years, where their unfocused spirits are allowed to do real damage to themselves and others.

Three generations are on display: The Father, spiritless and powerless, he has nothing to offer his two daughters. Yuki, the eldest daughter grew up during the end of the War. She knows hardship, and watched the crushing of the ideals of the youth movement that flowered after the war. She discarded happiness, and wears the sting of an old, failed love affair that never happened. Makoto, the youngest daughter, has never known suffering or hunger, and is wild and uncontrolled, seeking someone to tell her "No," with increasing acts of desperation. Makoto meets Kiyoshi, a poor student who sleeps with old women for money, and a dangerous love affair explodes. Like true nihilists, Makoto and Kiyoshi do not love each other, but they depend on each other to increase the level of their own self-destruction. They make money by luring elder men into a tryst with Makoto, then Kiyoshi attacks them and steals their cash. He enjoys beating them up, and Makoto enjoys their lustful looks and disillusionment when Kiyoshi strikes.

This is no fantasy film, and all of life's harsh realities await Makoto and Kiyoshi, including prison, abortion and death. What could be exploitative or heavy-handed is instead honest and hard in Oshima's capable hands. This is no morality lesson or cautionary tale, just a window into a terrible vision of humanity. Depressing even for a Japanese film, "Cruel Story of Youth" is not something that you are going to watch twice, but it is definitely worth watching once.