• 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.

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