Cruel Story of Youth

NEW 35mm PRINT!  │  Oshima’s shocking second feature was the breakthrough film — the Breathless — of the Japanese New Wave, and has also been called a Japanese Rebel Without a Cause. Offering a luridly stylish portrait of alienation and aimlessness, of social and moral drift, in postwar Japan, it’s also a key work in the “Sun Tribe” cycle of youth exploitation films popular in Japan in the 1960s. A Tokyo teen hoodlum uses his middle-class girlfriend to lure older married men into compromising positions, and then shakes them down for cash. The film’s great popular success made Oshima “the darling of the age ... Cruel Story of Youth is one of Oshima’s best films” (Tadao Sato). “Oshima’s splashiest, most pop-besotted work, a grim tale that’s great fun to watch ... These are not Rebel’s wounded innocents, but tainted people in a dirty world, predators as well as prey. Where the film does resemble Rebel is in its supercharged, hot-blooded style: bold colours, intense close-ups, a mood of coiled tension that periodically explodes in sex and violence” (Nelson Kim, Senses of Cinema). “There’s not a predictable shot in the entire movie” (Vincent Canby, New York Times). Colour, 35mm, in Japanese with English subtitles. 96 mins.