Following the war Akira Kurosawa would begin to establish a rhythmic form to his films more personal in content and structure than his pre-war films, perhaps due to lighter occupation enforced censorship rules, the beginning of which is evident in this political melodrama, starring a young Setsuko Hara as a neutral college girl in love with two men, a liberal and a radical. The style Kurosawa was experimenting with has more to do with temporal editing, such as an early scene where Hara and her suitors playfully run through the forest, echoing an editing technique he’d use to perfection in “Seven Samurai”, than it does with lighting, which would be of more importance two years later with “Drunken Angel”, but the montage brings an exciting makeup to the picture that is all but lost in the relatively staid politics of the love triangle, and Hara’s subsequent patriotic makeover as a peasant du jour. Important mainly for the assurance of a master director to come, and for the flourishing of the beautiful Setsuko Hara, who would secure her legend with Ozu in the decade to follow, “No Regrets for Our Youth” is specific to its time and place, when Japanese cinema was beginning to find its post-war feet, and the atrocities of the militarist government during the war were finally being laid publicly to bear.