The Criterion Collection team continues its noble mission
to unearth rare and renowned film classics with its new digital restoration
of an obscure Japanese pre-New Wave gem- Ko Nakahira’s Kurutta
Kajitsu (Crazed Fruit, 1956). Indeed for those who
have perused Donald Richie’s numerous accounts of Japanese film history
and style Crazed Fruit will definitely ring a bell. Not as
famous as Oshima or Kurosawa‘s canonical works, Nakahira’s Crazed
Fruit was a singular, significant precursor to the Japanese New Wave
phenomenon of the Nineteen sixties. Digitally transferred from 35 mm camera
and optical soundtrack prints, the DVD is visually and aurally impeccable,
unleashing an idiosyncratic frisson of surprise and shock when viewed in widescreen
and home theater systems. Released in Japanese with optional English subtitles
the film demands careful and sensitive attention, probably several viewings
to fully comprehend and appreciate its magnitude in Japanese and International
cinema history.
As we clearly and doubtless pleasurably float in a glut of Asian New-new -waves
(ranging from Kim Ki Duk to Wong Kar Wai, and the endless shape-shifting cults
of Manga and Zatoichi) Nakahira’s film reminds us of Japanese Cinema’s
modernist experiments in capturing the highly individualistic, self-fashioning
élan of post-war youth. Cinematically this was a moment of transition
from the age of Mizoguchi, Ozu and Kurosawa to the cutting-edge marriage of
revolutionary politics and poetics in Oshima, Yoshida, and Yoshishige.
Based on Shintaro Ishihara’s novel of the same name, Nakahira‘s
film is, among other things an exemplar of the Sun Tribe generation (Taiyozoku)
in post-war Japan. “Sun Tribe” as represented in the both the
film and Michael Raine’s accompanying essay denotes the desultory, disillusioned
life style and attitude of an exclusive but affluent section of post-war Japanese
youth. Literally signifying a generation that had both the time and money
to sun bathe, the film is structured around the sibling rivalry of two, rich,
brothers- Natsuhisa (Yujiro Ishihara - Shintaro’s brother) and Haruji
(Masahiko Tsugawa). Haruji the shy, younger, sibling is both critical and
curious of Natsuhisa and his Sun-Tribe gang’s life-style. Things begin
to change for Haruji when he falls in love with Eri (Mie Kitahara)- a winsome
girl they meet in the train station. While Haruji’s infatuation gradually
develops into serious love, Natsuhisa’s lustful rivalry is fueled by
his knowledge that Eri is married to an older, American sugar daddy. Eri quite
easily gives in to the lascivious and romantic impulses of Natshuhisa and
Haruji, admitting eventually to the noble, innocent love of Haruji. Nakahira’s
subtle portrayal of individual psychology in conjunction with a playful loosening
of film style offers for a great companion piece to what came three years
later as a 1959 French New Wave hit- Claude Chabrol’s Les Cousins.
While there appears a critique of the ideology and activities of the sun-tribe
in the timid Haruji and his sexual awakening, the film belies ambivalence
in this critique through its superb visual and aural celebration of adolescent
obsessions- jazz, speed, sex and sand. Nakahira charges his sequences on the
speed boat with a visceral and tactile thrust, while contrastively, his erotic
compositions as Donald Richie describes are “muted” and suggestive.
Quick edits, aggressive close-ups and foregrounds and expressive use of Jazz
(music for the feature was composed by the famous Masaru Sato and Toru Takemitsu)
underscore the sensational, albeit anxious, effect it had on its public and
its departure from the naturalistic style of filmmaking that had dictated
Japanese cinema until then.
All of the stylistic innovations and historical worth of Crazed Fruit
are richly elaborated in the Special Features section of the DVD. Firstly,
the inclusion of the theatrical trailer is historical evidence of the film’s
scandalous reception and cinematic significance. Secondly, the feature-length
audio commentary by film and cultural historian Donald Richie provides numerous,
precious, nuggets of details on Nakahira, Ishihara, the production history
of the film and Japanese film industry in the post-war period. Richie also
offers insightful image and sound analysis mapping the film’s stylistic
influences and coincidences with International film trends and French Cinema
in particular. In addition, a 16 page booklet containing two informative essays
by Chuck Stephens (Heat Stroke! Japanese Cinema’s Season in the Sun)
and Michael Raine (Imagining a New Japan: The Taiyozoku Films) are enclosed.
Chuck Stephens’ giddying, descriptive prose offers a quick introduction
to the film, its reception and the popular cultural context of the period.
Michael Raine by contrast offers a broader analysis of Taiyozoku films and
Crazed Fruit‘s pivotal interpretation of the changing
currents in post war Japanese society and cinema. There remains however, in
both Richie’s audio commentary and Stephens’ essay a tendency
to valorize Oshima’s appreciation of Crazed Fruit and
the film’s relation to the Japanese New Wave of the 1960s. While it
is true that Oshima admired and acknowledged the innovations and boldness
of filmmakers like Nakahira, he was also aware of the formalist traps in such
experiments. For more on this, read Oshima’s essay “Is it
a Breakthrough?" (The Modernists of Japanese Film) in Cinema, Censorship,
and the State). Oshima’s skepticism came true in the case of Nakahira,
whose film career slumped into commercial remakes for the Shaw Brothers. Nonetheless,
Nakahira’s representation of the changing concerns of Japan’s
youth through attention to film form would reach its radical fruition and
synthesis in the works of Oshima, where Masahiko Tsugawa returns as the selfish,
cruel slum leader in The Sun’s Burial.
DVD Film Score: A
DVD Special Features Score: A+
Overall Score: A+
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