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少年 Shonen (Boy), 1969, Oshima Nagisa dir.
Amazing. A thorough negation of Japanese film and Japan, and surprisingly timely to boot. This is the story of a family of swindlers who fake accidents and extort money out of drivers. The story is told through the oldest son.
I was taken with the realism in this film and especially its interpenetration with the surreal. Like a number of Oshima plots, the story is taken from the tabloids. In that sense, it's "true", but on another level, it's completely unreal for a family to live on accident-faking scams. (Y'know, kinda like a country that tried to live on flipping real estate.) The family functions as a swindling operation and nothing else, and this is obviously unsustainable. Compare this to one fo the melodramas of the "Golden Age" of Japanese cinema. Even if an Ozu or Naruse film portrays a dysfunctional family, it still appeals to an ideal of family. Just think of Hara Setsuko in Tokyo monogatari: the kids are all jerks, but the Hara Setsuko character fills the emotional and moral void they create. Naruse films are darker, but people weep for what has been lost or lost chances. No one weeps for this family.
As in Ozu films there were a lot of train shots -- this is a road movie, too. In Ozu, the train shots never seem so real, partly because they enframe or set the rhythm of the melodrama. Here the train shot is more or less what you see and the family & their scams are within that. It almost has to be, because the action takes place on the street, not around the kitchen table.
The screening i saw is part of a Oshima retrospective running from September 2008 to June 2009. The venues are: New York Film Festival; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Harvard Film Archive, Cambridge; Pacific Cinematheque, Vancouver; Gene Siskel Film Centre, Art Institute of Chicago; American Cinematheque and Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles; Northwest Film Center, Seattle; Cleveland Cinematheque; Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus; National Gallery of Art, American Film Institute, and American Film Institute & Freer Gallery, Washington D.C.; George Eastman House, Rochester; College of Moving Images, Santa Fe; Madison Cinematheque; Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley.
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