Tag: Harumi Kuse

Age of Nudity (素ッ裸の年令, Seijun Suzuki, 1959)

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Stylistically speaking, Seijun Suzuki’s Age of Nudity (素ッ裸の年令, Suppadaka no Nenrei) is one of the least interesting of his early phase and features only brief moments of innovation such as using the cameo effect for Sabu’s flashback and elements of his taste for surrealism with unexpected cutting between events. It does however have something a little more interesting to say about the world of 1959 through the eyes of someone in the process of becoming an angry young man.

The film opens with Sabu (Saburo Fujimaki) in his school uniform gazing at motorbikes and exclaiming that adulthood must be wonderful because you can ride a bike whenever you want. Ken (Keiichiro Akagi), the leader of a group of mainly orphaned delinquents, shows him that he could do that now. His gang make a habit of “borrowing” bikes and makes money through reckless drag races. Ken’s instructions that the bikes must be returned afterwards is symbolic of his desire to live a more honest life. When Sabu gets involved with actual crimes such as robbing a local food stand, he becomes very angry with him for compromising his more noble vision of what this group should be. 

But Ken is also working with a newspaper reporter and selling him insider stories about pre-teen “delinquents” . It seems as if every day is a slow news day in the Japan in 1959, and the reporter continues to plant scare stories in an effort to create a moral panic about feral children. Ken seems to think that he’ll keep them out of it and not actually report on anything too back that directly involves them, but of course his conviction is naive. Nevertheless, he convinces himself that he’s doing it all for the group so he can get money to buy a fishing boat and support everyone through honest work. But at the same time the fact that it’s the newspapers echoes the ways in which these children have been pushed out of society, while also ironic in that the reason Sabu loses his pair round is because he’s unfairly called a troublemaker when trying to get a reluctant customer to finally pay her bill.

The newspaper round incident bears out the ways in which Sabu is unable to control his temper and his frustration often turns to violence. The reporter asks a friend of his at school hoping he will badmouth him, but the only says that he’s not a bad kid, it’s just that his family’s poor. What Sabu most wants is to stay in school, but his parents won’t pay and his mother even says that he’s getting above himself. Poor people like them don’t go to school they just work. But Sabu’s desire to break that barrier is thwarted by social prejudice and the frustration it arises in him. He first looks up to Ken as a role model, but is also the most betrayed on realising that it was Ken who leaked info on them to the press and that he’s planning to take their share of the loot and make a new life for himself alone in the country.

Humiliated after having been betrayed by the newspaper man, Ken then reverts to Sabu’s way of thinking, that as old as he gets this society won’t respect him. So perhaps he no longer needs to respect it or to stick to the nobility he was trying to teach the kids. Adulthood won’t be what we expected, he tells Yoko, as if he had thought that on turning 20 he’d suddenly be more respected and that he’d be able to forge his own future by buying a boat and becoming a fisherman. The film’s title does not translate particularly well, but the nuance is more like “the naked age” where age refers to that of a person rather than to an era. Sabu goes to the beach and marvels that everyone is “naked”, or rather that they’re all scantily clad in swimwear, and are therefore all the same with the divisions of class and wealth temporarily dissolves. But at the same time it’s more that he himself is naked in that he’s at his most raw and vulnerable. He feels himself to be alone, and has no role models to look to for how he should live his life. Resenting his father for bowing and screaming and his mother for her lack of ambition, he wants more for himself but also can’t find a way to get it. 

The fact that Ken is eventually killed in a fiery crash signals him out as a false prophet. The person the children should have been listening to was the homeless old man (Bokuzen Hidari) who appears in a vision of beatific pastorally at the film’s conclusion posed on a green hill with the sun behind him. Though the children sometimes make fun of him for his disability and what they see as a failure at life, the old man laughs it off and is constantly happy living in a tent with his little dog. He encourages the children and gives them helpful advice that helps to overcome the failures of their birth parents, while his presence suggests that true happiness is to be found only on escaping contemporary capitalist society. Sabu too perhaps comes to a similar conclusion, realising that their “independence” is an illusion when they have to compromise themselves morally in order to earn money. Ken may have given them false hope, but perhaps the old man is different in living his own “independent” life defined by humanism and simplicity free from the constraints of a society which only values and status.

Everything Goes Wrong (すべてが狂ってる, Seijun Suzuki, 1960)

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Everything goes wrong posterThe Tokyo of 1960 was one defined by unrest as the biggest protests in history filled the streets urging the government to rethink the renewal of the security treaty Japan had signed with America after the war in order to provide military support in the absence of a standing army. Yet the protests themselves are perhaps an indication of the extent to which the nation was already recovering. With the Olympics just four years away, post-war privation had been replaced by a rapidly expanding economy, dynamic global outlook, and increased possibilities for the young who enjoyed both greater personal freedom than their parents’ generation and a kind of optimism unthinkable merely ten years previously. Nevertheless, this sense of the new, of unchecked potential was itself disorientating and had, as some saw it, led to a moral decline in which youth aimlessly idled its time away on self indulgent pleasures – namely drink, drugs, promiscuous sex and American jazz.

This dark side of youth had become a talking point thanks to a series of notorious “Sun Tribe” movies produced by the youth-orientated Nikkatsu studios. The films were so controversial the studio was eventually forced to stop making them, but all they really did was tone down the shock factor to one of mild outrage. Seijun Suzuki, picking up the Sun Tribe mantle, goes further than most in Everything Goes Wrong (すべてが狂ってる, Subete ga Kurutteru), painting post-war malaise as a tragedy of generational disconnection as the chastened wartime generation, accepting their role in history, watch their children hurtle headlong down another alleyway of self destruction but are ultimately unable to save them.

Our “hero”, Jiro (Tamio Kawaji), is as someone later poignantly puts it, “a nice boy”. A student, he spends his spare time on the fringes of gang of petty delinquents who get their kicks freaking squares, engaging in acts of casual prostitution, and enacting non-violent muggings. Jiro’s main problem in life is his fierce attachment to his single-mother, Masayo (Tomoko Naraoka). After Jiro’s father was killed in the war (apparently run over by a Japanese tank), Masayo became involved with a married man who has been supporting herself and Jiro for the last ten years. Young enough to have an almost completely black and white approach to moral justice, Jiro cannot stomach this fact and accuses his mother of being a virtual prostitute, accepting money for sex without love.

Jiro repeatedly accuses the older generation of hypocrisy, that they lie about their true feelings and motivations whilst denying their responsibility for the war which took his father’s life. Yet, Nambara (Shinsuke Ashida), his mother’s lover, is a kind and honest man who answers every question put to him honestly and with fierce moral integrity. He admits his responsibility for the folly of war – something he feels keenly seeing as he is a weapons engineer by trade, but rejects Jiro’s characterisation of his relationship with Masayo as something essentially immoral. His justifications are perhaps, as Jiro puts it, “philanderer’s clichés”, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t true. Nambara, as a young man, entered into an arranged marriage with the daughter of a now deceased general. The marriage is loveless and emotionally dead, but Nambara is an earnest person and will honour the commitment he made to his first wife even if it brings him personal pain. Masayo has always known this and even if he cannot legally marry her, Nambara has given her his heart and will also honour that commitment in continuing to try and make her son see that he is not the enemy, just another man who loves his mother.

There is something quite ironic in Jiro’s strangely conservative moral universe which rejects the “impure” nature of his mother’s romance, while the older generation are better positioned to understand that things are never as simple as they seem. Jiro is rigid and unforgiving where his parents are flexible and empathetic. He rejects his mother for being a “whore” but throws money at a girl who is in love with him because he thinks that’s what women “want”. Unable to accept her emotional needs, he thinks of her as a prostitute and thereby abnegates his responsibility – the exact opposite of the “goodness” Nambara displays in offering financial support for a woman he loves which (in his eyes) has no particular strings and is given only with the intention of making her life easier.

Jiro, infected both by mother and madonna/whore complexes, is profoundly disturbed when another young woman tries to point out that aside from being his mother Masayo is also a woman with normal human needs both emotional and physical. Following his botched attempt to blacken Nambara in her eyes, he drags his mother to a breezy youth fuelled beach party where he throws her into a tent full of lithe young male bodies and tells her to have her fill. Nambara, still determined to talk Jiro around, laments to Masayo that they never had the opportunity to experience the kind of freedom that these youngsters feel themselves entitled to. If only they were not so trapped by the social codes of their era, they might have been happy. Yet these youngsters, with everything in front of them, are anything but – determined to destroy themselves in nihilistic confusion, caught in a moment of flux when nothing is certain and everything is possible.

At the film’s conclusion, a cynical journalist remarks to a sympathetic mama-san that “today, goodwill between people can’t exist anywhere, everything has gone wrong”. Jiro’s tragic fate is that he, like many “nice” kids like him, cannot reconcile himself to the moral greyness of the post-war world in which the “heroic sacrifice” of their parents’ is hypocritically held up as wholesome entertainment. Unable to accept the love and kindness of Nambara who only wants to act as a father to him and continues to believe that “one day he will understand” even after Jiro has hurt him deeply both emotionally and physically, Jiro has only one direction in which to turn.

Suzuki weaves Jiro’s tale around that of his friends – the unhappy delinquents and the struggling workers, women used by men who promise them love but reject their responsibilities, women who think they have to trade something to win love which ought to be freely given, and the older generation who can do nothing more than look on with sadness as youth destroys itself. Suzuki’s sympathies lie with everyone, but more than most with the Nambaras of the world who are desperately trying to fix what was broken but find that in a world that’s already gone crazy kindness is met with suspicion while money, corrupting true emotional connection, has become the only arbiter of bitter truths.