Hatsukoi: Jigoku-hen

Director and creator of this movie, Susumu Hani was one of the directors who were known for his avant garde movie making style. There were others in his league such as Nagisa Ooshima, and Kiju Yoshida that formed Japanese New Wave cinema movement. Hani himself had an avant garde lifestyle getting divorced from his wife finding out that he was having an affair with her sister, and Hani later marrying the sister of his ex-wife.

Hatsukoi Jigokuhen was an experimental movie made in the late '60s when Japan was experiencing new culture movement influenced by the Hippie culture. Most of Japan's avant garde films are from this period.

This movie was made for the youth of the time. It depicts the difficulties that the youth were experiencing at the time such as college entrance exam, country girl coming to Tokyo and having to work as a nude model to supplement her income, and a boy who's relationship with her is his first love. Both Kuniko Iwai who played Nanami and Akio Takahashi who played Shun were new comers into the movie business. I believe the little girl who played Mami is Hani's own four year old daughter Mio Hani.

While other directors who were part of the avant garde movement were seriously seeking new forms of liberal expression with various success, I believe that Hani has bona fide insanity about his approach. The movie shows the underground culture that existed in Japan at the time, but there are segments that are not related to the story that borders on child porn, SM element in what goes on inside the underground clubs.

All of the avant garde movies that came out of Japan are very quiet. Conversations are all quiet and slow, and so is the progress of the story. And all talk about free spirited people, that in many ways live irresponsible lives. In the end the style seemed to have failed to set new direction, and people lost interest in this style of movie. Looking at them 40 years later is interesting in seeing the society of Japan during that time.

Is this a film about "first love"? No -- there's no warm delightful discovery here. Maybe the film about the impossibility of love...which is a bleak statement.

What we do get is very painful depiction of sexual trauma, and gratuitous -- but stylish -- depictions of sexual violence and pedophilia. If the viewer is hoping to see innocent joys, they are in for waaaay more than they bargained for.

I admire the director Hani's courage and inventiveness -- many risks are taken. But the transgressive material feels mostly tacked-on -- for example, it's ambiguous if the "photo-shoot party scene" is "about pornography", or is simply pornography.

In the end, Hani's courage to break moral norms is stronger than his emotional courage. The film fearlessly portrays trauma and perversion, but not the courage of love and ethics. A particular failure of the film is how flat the female lead is. She's cute and she smiles a lot. But she is not given a chance to become completely human. Instead we're left only with tears without meaning or ending.

This is an actual question in the film, something to seriously meditate on. The riddle suggests the answer (that we get nothing), but the answer given challenges our preconceived notion.

Can we say we get nothing from the peeling of the onion? We still have an onion (peeled away) and the peeling has happened, there is change, movement, progression. This is how I feel the film functions as New Wave. If we peel it to arrive at a core we may be frustrated, but if we come for the peeling instead? For the process of transformation itself?

So, if you peel life what do you get? In a marvelous hypnosis scene, a young man is called by the doctor to visualize a screen and see what goes there. Do we project ourselves upon the images on screen or does the screen upon us?

The first love here is awkward, erratic, youthful, perhaps not love at all. The inferno is society and the self, or the self trying to cope with society. I like how the portrait of youth is angsty but loving, how the folly of youth is embraced. In Yoshishige Yoshida's Eros + Massacre from the following year, the two young students living in a modern Japan are aimless, disaffected, they act as though they know. Here the young couple fumbles in the dark, only now getting to know that the world is a dark place.

And if we peel cinema, what do we get then? If we begin to disassimilate the narrative in the effort to see what exists inside and examine the parts, do they make a whole or do we make it by our presence as viewers; this is why Inferno is valuable to me, because I'm always on the lookout for films the peel away the language of cinema, tweak and contort image to see will it break down at some point to reveal truth.

Oh, we may get nothing at all eventually, or have a helluva hard time convincing others that nothingness itself is the most valuable, but we are still not at the point where we started. Meaning a journey has taken place that dislocated us, our sense, our sense of image.

In this sense this is a true New Wave film. As with Godard the breach with traditional narrative is desirable here, unlike Godard though Nanami is not reactionary, it's angsty or unorthodox because it has a reason. Nanami's society hasn't solved its problems yet like the French New Wave's has, or perhaps in having solved some of them, a yawning chasm that goes back in time is revealed.

You may find this hard to see. It is a Japanese "new wave," film. It has a story of course, but such things are largely irrelevant. I'll give it because you may not see it. (In my comments, I assume most folks have seen the film.)

A young man was abandoned as a child, and continuously molested by his adoptive father. He falls "in love" with a prostitute, around the same time he is imprisoned for molesting a four year old girl. We follow him and the prostitute (actually a "model") separately; that's most of the film, timewise. The story ends tragically.

Its shot with hand-held cameras, and even by today's standards the camera movements are obviously there to remind you that there is a camera present. Not your eyes, but a physical camera.

Following the French notion, the "new wave" ideas are followed: the fact that it is a film is explicit and films are referenced throughout the thing. And the elements of the story are abstracted — usually from the most raw and common experience, love — into something synthetic, which only can exists in cinema. These two elements were thought by the French create a new film narrative: not using the camera to place you in life, but the other way around, using life to allow you to travel to a new place, abstract, pure and effective within its own rules.

That French experiment collapsed, I think, because as a class, French intellectuals don't have much horsepower, so after we get the cleverness of us being placed in this synthetic world, we look for a reason to be there other than tourism from boredom. The Japanese, on the other hand, actually live is an abstract world, deliberately so. And its of much the same type — less now than 40-50 years ago (unless you count manga). By this I mean that the narrative they live in is close to the one they imagine, and they've had 1500 years of continuous stylization to abstract the narrative into a coherent collection of edges.

So when I encounter Japanese new wave films, or better, those that quote and extend the concept, I know I'm where the idea wanted to be, but was couldn't go there with its originators.

This one isn't powerful in the way the HongKongers Wong Kar Wai and Fruit Chan do, but it has oompf if you allow for the amazingly noticeable proscription on pubic hair — but that's part of the game.

Along the way, we have all sorts of side stories, as if they were movies within the movie. Some are flashbacks that are movies in the mind. Others are of the same type, but everyday events: a pocketknife is dropped; a foil gumwrapper blows in the wind.

And these are interspersed with overt films within. We have a film about first love our lovers attend. She is a model for filmed stories, always pornographic (but indicated here as topless cheesecake because of the censorship) and often violent. He purchases a record designed to have a conversation with him. Much of the action touches on or is in a graveyard, shown as a collection of storymarkers for the dead.

An item that permeates is a riddle. If you peel a cabbage, you get a core. If you peel an onion, what do you get? The film is intended to be a peeling of the onion. You'll need to watch the film (or email me) to get the answer to the riddle.

Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 3: Worth watching.

Well who says the Japanese can't do French? A long slow-paced drama about a man with a past. A past that screws up his potential romances. Apparently his father was a bad man and now he can only talk to loose chicks.

The core is about first love in general. Most of us have dealt with it. This is how this one guy tries to.

The filming is sehr arty and you know the dialogue was deliberate. The pace reminds one of a student film at times and the camera-work was good for the seemingly non-existent budget.

I saw this on video years ago and saw it again in Tokyo during an art house revival. I wish it were better known.

This is one you can take your lady to as well.