Subete ga kurutteru

Tamio Kawaji doesn't like that his mother has been a married businessman's mistress for fifteen years. He lives on the money, but it makes him miserable. He earns some money stealing cars, and his girlfriend, Yoshiko Nezu, sides with him. She tries to raise money for a friend who's gotten pregnant, only she doesn't want to bother the boy she is living with about an abortion. As the situation spirals out of control, the older couple tries to talk with the youngster, to explain things to him, but he doesn't want to hear about it.

Seijun Suzuki's movie about juvenile delinquency and the causes of it is sensationalistic, and offers no real solutions, only a beginning of one. Mostly, though, it's about violence and anger and alienation.

Lets look at the basic story: Jiro is a clean cut, hard working student looking to please his mother, who is having an affair with a business man. Dismissing his mother's situation as prostitution, he falls in further with a crowd of proud criminals and goes down the bad path. Also intertwining sub plots including a young woman trying to raise money for an abortion to not burden her living partner and Jiro's new girlfriend who is involved with a gangster.

Certainly at first glance of a summary like this, one envisions a life time channel movie, or something in the vain of MST3K fodder like "I Accuse My Parents". What ultimately saves this can be summed up thusly: Seijun Suzuki. I won't say this is his best movie necessarily, but it probably displays his strength best, making movies that revel in absurdity while not becoming flat out comedies.

It's to Suzuki's credit that many of these scenes come off less laughable than they should, while others are played up to such an extent you can only laugh, but all of it feels intentional and calculated. Characters will completely shift in behavior at points, and it's a testament to Suzuki we can still take anything seriously in all of this.

One particularly brilliant scene has a man trying to make a solemn, heart felt confession to someone, the kind of performance one would expect in a serious drama, while the person he's speaking to is making out with his girlfriend and talking in a snappy, Godardian fashion. A complete contrast of moods that seems like the actors are in two completely different movies, and yes it inspires a few laughs while still eliciting sympathy, and is brilliant in how it conveys the utter dissonance and break down in communication between them.

I mentioned Godard earlier, and certainly more than a few touches of "Breathless" can be seen here. There are a few jump cuts near identical to those in "Breathless", and towards the end Jiro even begins talking a little like Michel, however there's enough original flourish here. The camera work is sweeping and complimentary to this hyper paced film of only 70 minutes, weaving through plot points gracefully. There's a lot of content in this seventy minute picture but it is never rushed.

Well worth a look.

This post-war Japanese film essentially revolves around a young man by the name of "Jiro Sugita" (Tamio Kawaji) who lives alone with his mother and hangs out with his friends who have formed a street gang of sorts. Within this gang is a girl named "Toshimi Tani" (Yoshiko Nezu) who is quite smitten with Jiro and believes that the reason he doesn't return her affection is due to his overall shyness-and this only increases her resolve to be with him even more. What she doesn't know is that Jiro is insanely troubled by the fact that his mother has been having an affair for ten years with a married man named "Keigo Nanbara" (Shinsuke Ashida) who also loves her but cannot bring himself to file for a divorce from his wife. As a result Jiro harbors an extreme disdain for all women and treats them accordingly. So when Toshimi finally breaks the ice with him and they end up sleeping together she isn't quite prepared for what happens afterward. Now rather than reveal any more I will just say that this coming-of-age film had more than its fair share of personal dramas involving a number of other characters than those just mentioned. It also consisted of some overly-dramatic acting that is uniquely typical for many Japanese films of this type as well. That being said, while it may not appeal to all audiences, it wasn't too bad for the most part and I have rated it accordingly. Slightly above average.

The life of bitter teenager Jiro Sugita (Tamio Kawaji) spirals out of control as his petty lawlessness and his resentment of his mother's relationship with a married man leads to violence. Seijun Suzuki's teen melodrama is an unpleasant snapshot of life amongst disaffected youth who were born in the ruins of Japan just as the War in the Pacific was ending. Jiro's resentment comes from his mother being forced to take money from a lover in order to survive, money that Jiro hates but willing demands (the idea of being dependent on outside money may have been very resonant with audiences during Japan's 'rebuilding' stage). The film is quite 'adult', with brief glimpses of nudity, issues such as abortion and youth prostitution, and candid and casual off-screen brutality (there are several indifferent references to girls in the gang being raped by multiple boys). I found it more disturbing than a comparable American 'JD' pic, possibly because the youth look more 'innocent' (especially the girls) and less like the 'cliched' street hoodlums you'd see in, for example, a John Cassavetes film. The direction is quite effective although the acting was a bit melodramatic at times (although angry teens are not particularly known for subtleties of behaviour). The cinematography is good except for a number of weak and obvious back-projection scenes and the young cast, notably Yoshiko Nezu as Jiro's 'in for anything' girlfriend Toshimi and Shinako Nakagawa as her desperate pregnant friend Etsuko, is quite good. An interesting look at the darker side of Japanese post-war culture, well-made but not for all tastes.

Also known as The Madness of Youth - if you want to find this one on the internet, that's the title I found it under. And you'll want to find this one. It's one of Suzuki's best. It shares many similarities with Koreyoshi Kurahara's The Warped Ones, which I watched (and reviewed) a while back, and it even stars the same actor, Tamio Kawaji, again playing a disaffected youth (Everything Goes Wrong came out less than a month afterward). In The Warped Ones, Kawaji was a total ass, completely despicable. He's kind of despicable here, but the story does more to redeem him - to show that he's just a confused child rebelling against his elders.

After his father died in the war, his mother shacked up with a rich, married man. Fifteen years later, he's still hanging around, and Kawaji thinks of his mother as a prostitute. He kind of thinks of all women that way. It doesn't help that the women he hangs around with are extremely promiscuous (while this comes before the era of the true pinky films, the descriptions of sex are surprisingly graphic). The film is very moralistic, but the characters are well written, and the script flows quickly between several different plot lines (it runs a mere 71 minutes but feels absolutely stuffed - though not overstuffed). The real star, of course, is Seijun Suzuki. It's often said that Suzuki was nothing but a factory worker for Nikkatsu at the time. That may be, but a Hell of a worker he was, and his camera darts around breathlessly and beautifully. You know that famous between the legs shot in Kurosawa's Yojimbo? Suzuki beat him to it by a year (he probably wasn't the first either, but I know I always associate that shot with Yojimbo). The editing is also tremendous, although, supposedly, Suzuki would have nothing to do with that. After all, this was just one of four films the director would make in 1960.