Reviews of No Regrets for Our Youth
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Rodney Welch
30Dec08
As the 1946 date indicates, this moving drama from Akira Kurosawa was truly a hot-off-the-presses sort of enterprise; the country had barely been liberated from militarist oppression than the young director took full advantage of his newfound freedom to criticize the country’s long slide toward fascism.
Spanning the years between 1933 and 1945, it features the beautiful and beguiling Setsuko Hara, best-known for her work with Yasujiro Ozu, as Yukie, a naive, idealistic young woman whose world is shaken to the core when her father, a respected professor, criticizes the government for squelching academic freedom. This leads to a student revolt, which in turn leads to a government crackdown. Yukie finds herself torn between two fellow students, the docile Itokawa (Akitake Kono) and the radical leftist Noge (Haruko Sugimora). As the run-up to the war gets in full swing, Yukie finds love, purpose and danger with Noge, who finds a comfortable research job, which is actually just a cover for his nobly anti-government plans.
To put it in “Casablanca” terms, Yukie plays Ilsa to his Victor, suffers interrogation from the authorities when he’s jailed, and ultimately takes on his struggle for the larger cause. The film follows her on a journey from innocence to wisdom; a winsome, piano-playing, head-in-the-clouds coquette who will, eventually, get her hands dirty and become a local hero, a veritable Madonna of the rice paddy. Hara delivers the kind of unrestrained emotional performance that would never quite fit in the generally more somber world of Ozu.
Besides being Kurosawa’s only film with a female lead, this may also be his most frankly political (that I’ve seen, anyway), and it does not carry it’s message lightly, as Kurosawa proudly (and quite safely) hoists the middle finger toward the country’s deposed leader and his miserable minions. Perhaps it was a movie he had to get out of his system; certainly it’s a movie made with a great deal of passion and conviction. Although no one would ever consider it first-rank Kurosawa, it displays touches of a raw, roaring talent in the making.
- Currently 4.0/5 Stars.
asuraf
28Dec08
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.
- Currently 4.0/5 Stars.