• 乾いた湖 (Dry Lake / Youth in Fury)

4/11/25 (Sat)

Criterion had a special feature on Shinoda Masahiro, presumably set up after the 94-year-old’s recent death. I’m not always a fan of the director – I’ve always considered his supposed masterpiece Double Suicide a self-consciously artsy piece of tripe – but he’s never less than boring. I wasn’t sure what film the title Youth in Fury referred to, but it turned out to be an alternative title to the more literal Dry Lake (Kawaita Mizuumi), though dried-up lake would be closer. (His later Kawaita Hana was similarly rendered as Pale Flower rather than the better “Withered Flower”.) The film was written by a young Terayama Shuji, later a notorious avant-garde playwright who worked with Shinoda on a number of his early works. He also has a cameo role in the film. This is Shinoda’s second feature film.

Japan was torn at the time between nihilism and revolution in the face of the US victory in both war and peace. Both trends would be wiped away in the high-growth years to follow, when the population became too busy for either emotion. The film features three key strands among youth at the time primarily via three characters, all fellow university students.

Shimojo is a wannabe rebel without a cause. He is a member of a revolutionary student group opposed to the US-Japan Security Treaty (known as Anpo) but is ejected when they learn that he’s been using their money for drinking and whoring. He openly accuses them of being passive fools, questioning the very point of protest. At the same time, he disparages an influential politician, who he considers equally powerless to deal with the US. (It doesn’t help that he is sleeping with the politician’s mistress.) He has posters of political leaders hanging on his wall, but the broad range from Hitler and Castro to FDR suggests that he believes in nothing other than the trappings of leadership.

He adopts a cool persona that he admits openly is just a front, but it does attract a number of male and female admirers. His list of female conquests is like his posters; he takes no interest in the women themselves beyond the thrill of conquering them. When his girlfriend reveals that she is pregnant, he shoves her aside, telling her that he has bigger things in mind. At the same time, his blasé dismissal of his male friend’s plea for help with financial troubles causes the kid to commit suicide, which doesn’t seem to affect him in the least. Shimojo enjoys classical music, a contrast with the jazz sound that defined young radicals in Japan at the time, and quotes a Langston Hughes poem on alienation (which is wrongly translated in the subtitles – you’d think they’d go to the trouble of looking up the original work). But he takes no action on his occasional convictions.

Meanwhile, Michihiko is a nihilistic rich son of an industrialist who enjoys watching his hangers-on pander to him. The film opens on a yacht where young students are enjoying Michihiko’s largesse, a Sun Tribe scene right out of Crazed Fruit. The bored Michihiko encourages games like trying to force women’s legs open or guessing whether their breasts are enhanced. He flaunts his riches but is convinced at the same time that others want him only for his wealth. He cynically uses his status to humiliate others: when a female friend quietly asks him for financial help, he writes a ¥2 million check on the spot and dangles it in front of her at a party, telling her that if she wants it, she must strip, sing and parade around the room in front of everyone. His is the vicious side of a postwar moneyed class that in its ennui has lost its cultural anchor.

The only one who doesn’t join the madding crowds is Yoko, as we find early on when she refuses to take part in the mixed-sex shower on the boat. That intrigues Shimojo. We learn that her father committed suicide in a corruption scandal, though there are whisperings that he has taken the fall for his superiors. Her sister’s fiancé has canceled their marriage due to the scandal, and their struggling mother has forced the sister to become the mistress of a sleazy politician in exchange for financial support. The disgusted Yoko vows to make it on her own, but is unable to find work. She approaches Michihiko to hire her even as a maid, but is shocked when he tries to take advantage of her. She slaps him and runs out in despair.

Shimojo, attracted by Yoko’s independent streak, arranges for a boxer friend to rough up the politician who jilted her sister. That proves his undoing. In his first sign of ambition, he has decided that the way to change the world is not through politics or peaceful demonstrations but by violence. He rouses himself to gather explosives, which he intends to use in a terrorist act. Just when he has created a bomb and heads out to use it, he runs into the arms of policemen who have come to arrest him for his part in the assault on the politician. They carry him out screaming, with no idea that the bag he drops contains deadly substances that might have changed the course of events.

As he is taken away, we see the distraught Yoko in escape from Michihiko’s place. Wandering dazed, she gets swept up in the massive Anpo protests that were only a few months old when the movie was released. As the march continues, she gradually gets caught in the revolutionary fervor and seems to find new purpose in life.

As noted, the filming was contemporaneous with the riots, which included attacks on the Diet and Haneda Airport and a political assassination, and Shinoda incorporates actual news footage. The original work, a serialized novel published in book form in 1958, dealt with student movements, but those had since reached fever pitch with the signing of the Security Treaty, which Shinoda has adeptly woven into his story. Neither Shinoda nor Terayama is as pretentiously mannered as each would become, and the picture is thankfully more straightforward than their more representative works. The director gives Shimojo a bit too much attitude, seemingly intent (probably at the studio’s urging) on making the actor, 19-year-old Mikami Shinichiro, a star in the mold of Ishihara Yujiro. That pushed the character at times into caricature. Still, the characters overall are vividly drawn, and the contrast among the three main roles is a potent picture of the times in the very midst of the historic protests. In just a few years, the demos died down, Anpo was forgotten, and the population turned its energies toward making money, a trend that has remained in force ever since; it’s safe to say that the general public is largely uninterested in politics these days. So the film is a valuable record of a very different Japan still looking to define itself after its wartime defeat.

Mikami is fine as the oh-so-cool Shimojo, though he never achieved the stardom he was clearly being groomed for; it didn’t help that his character, through no fault of his own, felt derivative. While I wish they had reined his character in, he handled the role well. Yamashita Junichiro also delivers as the rich kid Michihiko, especially in his more vicious moments. The standout, though, is Iwashita Shima as Yoko in her first of many films with Shinoda (whom she later married). Her steely determination to live free of others makes her the most sympathetic character. Takemitsu Toru provides a nicely understated score, also his first with Shinoda.

The film is an underrated gem, taking the Sun Tribe world of disillusion and vague discontent to the next dimension. The positive vibe at the end was an unexpected and welcome turn. Recommended.