• 狂った果実  (Crazed Fruit)

1/5/21 (Tues)

Nakahira Ko’s seminal 1956 film, which put the so-called taiyozoku (太陽族) or “sun tribe” on the map, is essentially Japan’s Look Back in Anger, a sensationalist look at disaffected youth in the postwar era that electrified the staid Japanese film world. It was adapted by Ishihara Shintaro from his novelette, which was bundled with two similar stories that were all made into films the same year (this being by far the best). The series includes the notorious Season of the Sun (太陽の季節), known infamously for the scene in which the main character slams his erect organ through the paper shoji screen. The title of that story led an interviewer to refer in an article to the Sun Tribe, a label that came to define a generation. (The story is alluded to in this film in the boat’s English name, Sun Season.) Ishihara makes a brief appearance in the film as one of a group of thugs, but more important was his insistence that the filmmakers cast his younger brother Yujiro, creating a legend.

The slight plot is set in a summer beach resort outside Tokyo in then-contemporary Japan. It features a group of bored rich 20-year-olds, who grew up in the shadow of defeat with no memory of Japan’s pre-war past and no sense of a future. They spend their time idling away their days in sailboats, nightclubs and cars in a bid to fight off tedium, devoted mainly to gambling, drinking, picking fights, dancing and especially hunting women, albeit just for momentary pleasure (including orgies) rather than anything as permanent as romance. The teenaged Haruji (a superb Tsugawa Masahiko, just 16 at the time) falls in love with a beautiful woman (Kitahara Mie), not knowing that she (1) is also sleeping with, among others, his older brother, the cooler-than-cool Natsuhisa (Yujiro – think a Japanese James Dean), and (2) is secretly married to a much older American sugar daddy. The woman, no better morally than the men she toys with, becomes extremely attracted to the innocence of the younger kid, who barely manages the courage to kiss her. That purity of heart stands in sharp contrast to her treatment by other men and, it must be said, her treatment of them, giving her an ideal that her generation has forgotten or never knew. Nevertheless, she is unable to resist the insistent charms and sexuality of the more experienced Natsuhisa. When the latter takes advantage of Haruji’s absence to lure the girl away on a sailing excursion, the heartbroken Haruji, betrayed by both sides, angrily hunts them down in a speedboat and takes his revenge in a genuinely shocking ending.

The point is less the plot as such than the attitude. The kids have their water skiing, fancy nightclubs, seaside villas and such – well beyond the means of the vast majority of Japanese kids at the time – but no aspirations in a rootless country whose values appear to be losing out to the West. They put on airs in the absence of anything real to hang onto. Natsuhisa’s disdain for bourgeois life is matched by the half-American Frank (played by half-Danish Okada Masumi), who practically drips with ennui, as at a shooting gallery where he pointedly ignores the flirts of a beautiful vamp as he aims for worthless prizes. The innocent Haruji rejects their “sun tribe” ways, criticizing them for “aimlessly killing time”. He doesn’t know what he wants, he says, but wants something. His brother answers, “‘Something’ isn’t so easy to find. Intellectual high-minded talk isn’t worth a damn. . . Fancy words and old ways don’t cut it now. We need something with a fresh nip to it.” When a girl observes that they “live in boring times”, he responds, “Exactly. So we make boredom our credo. Eventually something will come of it.”

The kinetic filmmaking and wonderful jazzy score (by Kurosawa regular Sato Masaru and future star Takemitsu Toru in his first film) takes this far beyond the static Ozu world. The medium is truly the message. The film is filled with shirtless bodies, lovemaking, erections (in the form of a suggestive bulge in Haruji’s swim trunks), brawling, dancing and much restless movement. The sight of Haruji piloting the motorboat echoes Alain Delon’s iconic image in the Japanese favorite Plein Soleil (literally Full Sun – there’s that sun again). Parents and other adults are practically non-existent. It’s a youth-driven world with no morals or foundation or clear future. Rebellious youths were a worldwide phenomenon in the 1950s, but Japan’s wartime devastation and subservience to America, upending everything that the country had been led to believe, makes this a particularly pointed case.

The film established the careers of several of the young actors making their effective debuts here: Ishihara Yujiro of course, but also Tsugawa (subsequently a multi-award-winning actor/director and an Itami Juzo regular) and the tall, handsome Okada, among others. Tsugawa (Farewell to Spring), virtually the same age as the character, was perfect as the naïve younger brother, while Okada’s cool indifference and foreign looks defined an entire ethos. Kitahara Mie, the woman loved by both brothers, later married Yujiro, and their chemistry on screen is palpable. The film is a picture of a generation at a certain time but, as every generation looks for its own path, still thrills today. Ishihara Shintaro went on to bigger things as an ultra-conservative politician, retaining his power to provoke outrage. In contrast, the director Nakahira did little else of lasting value, but he did at least have one crucial work that can justly claim to be one of the most influential Japanese films ever made, inspiring a generation of filmmakers. A fast-flowing, image-driven, fascinating film.