Nanami: The Inferno of First Love

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.

An insecure guy falls in love with a young nude model.But his past sexual abuse hinders him of loving inhibitedly. He meets a little girl in the park instead... The story isn't that linear and that's why the freely linked episodes of this film just takes you on a shaky underwater rollercoaster ride. Beautiful camera-shots, excellent editing, great music, great acting...

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.

I've just seen this film in a rare cinema screening. It's difficult to comment on this film. There are so many disparate elements and themes. Perhaps what the director was trying to do was create a portrait of a society in a time and a place that was antithetical to love. How can the young love of our two heroes (Shun and Nanami) be succoured by a society that has embraced the commodification of sexuality (including the sexual commodification of children), and rigid glacial patriarchalism. The ending of the movie underlines this (but I won't give it away).

Some of the absurd constipated behaviour of the Japanese is on full display here, Shun is so up-tight that he has to go to classes and be taught to laugh. Daisuke a high-school friend of Nanami shows a film in his university film club about his love for another girl at his high school, how he never managed to express it or have it recognised. It seems he barely even spoke to the object of his affection. He says that if she had just been beautiful that he would have been able to find another love. But by all accounts he was much more deeply attracted to her. They say that one's first love is always the strongest. For Daisuke it was so strong that it becomes hollow and obsessional, he will never love again.

Of course the beauty of this movie and its inventiveness marks it out as a very interesting film. Some of the shots are amazingly beautiful, their composition not entirely relevant to proceedings, almost cinematic asides (urban vistas, and graveyard scenes). It has a sense of atmosphere on a par with Rivette and Godard, and the film is much more dense and complex than films made by those two directors, or to be more accurate presents a portrait of a Japanese society profoundly more multi-textured than the France of the New Wave. A Japan at the crossroads between tradition and modernity both spiritually, intellectually, and socially.

At least in parts this movie is ambivalent, it portrays first love as foolish, obsessional and shallow and it also is sympathetic to the sadoerotic subculture (at least in places). But that's why it's so good, nothing is fed to you on a plate.

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.