Youth in Fury / Dry Lake / Kawaita mizuumi (1960)

Japan entered “the sixties” considerably earlier than other countries, with a radical opposition to governmental policies dating from the formal end of the Occupation in 1952. As with the sixties protest movements in France and the US, these were as often age based as politically motivated, with the most vocal and active opposition led by college students. In 1960, when Japan and the US revised their joint defense agreement, which slightly improved Japan’s sense of face while leaving much of the nation occupied by American military bases, the students and other groups took to the streets and eventually sat-in at Haneda airport, closing it down for some time, and, depending on your point of view, protested at or attacked the Diet itself, which led to at least one death and a severe crackdown on “left-wing” groups. This provides the background for Shinoda’s Youth in Fury, as it is called in Criterion‘s release.*

Like the times themselves, the movie is chaotic. The principal character is Takuya, an alienated youth who seems to have one foot in the world of the protestors and one in the Sun Tribe world of the do-nothing wealthy and would-be-wealthy who hang out in Tokyo jazz clubs and bars. But it is very difficult from this distance to feel any empathy for Takuya, since he works so hard at being Joe Cool. In public, he’s all leather jacket and dark glasses, grooving on the cool jazz,** while in private he hides in his room listening to Wagner surrounded by Time Magazine covers and pictures of Hitler. Somehow he attracts an intelligent girl named Yoko, but it is certainly hard to tell what she sees in him. Nowhere do we feel like we know what he is really about.

Although he spends some time with the student protestors, we never quite feel like that is where he belongs or what the script is really interested in. We don’t really get much, if any, insight into the protest world (just as Hollywood never really managed to do anything more than promulgate clichés about “hippies” in the seventies). Much more interest seems to fall on how money still fuels the traditional relationships, especially for women.

Michihiko, the one genuinely rich kid in Takuya’s circle, simply uses his money only to humiliate others, while those of merely middle-class status face all kinds of financial problems. One young woman offers herself to Michihiko as the collateral for a loan in hopes of saving her father’s business. Another boy in their circle hangs himself after his father’s death leaves the family penniless. Even though it is 1960, not 1860, Yoko’s mother has sold her older sister to a scummy politician and Yoko is desperately looking for a way to avoid a similar fate.

All of this is played with western dress, western furniture, and western music. My guess is that the studio hoped to use the movie to make Shin’ichiro Mikami, who played Takuya and was only 19, into another youth star. If so, it didn’t work. He had some significant later roles, but never became the kind of star that could drive a movie by himself.

Nevertheless, it remains a historically significant movie.  It is one of Shinoda’s earliest directing jobs. You can see his strong visual sense already present, but the tightness and dramatic impact of his later work is barely in evidence, perhaps because it is not one of the movies he also scripted. The music (except for the Wagner) is provided by Toru Takemitsu in one of his earliest solo scoring jobs, but without any hint of the dramatic impact he would have on Japanese soundtracks in the sixties. Similarly, Shima Iwashita plays Yoko in one of her first roles of a major dramatic career in the sixties and seventies, particular in movies directed by Shinoda. Because of these introductions to figures who would only shortly become giants in Japanese cinema, it perhaps takes on more significance than it really deserves.

Though a DVD was issued by Criterion, a check today shows it is no longer available.

• * The literal translation of the Japanese title is Dry Lake, but the movie was released in France as Jeunesse en furie, which is perhaps where Criterion found its title.
• ** For those of us raised on rock’n’roll as the sound of protest and youth culture, it is always a shock to see that role taken on by American fifties jazz, but this was apparently true in Japan, and, if many New Wave movies are to be believed, also in France.