Sunday, June 7, 2009
A Kind of Epic: Kurosawa's No Regrets For Our Youth
I had seen this film on a VHS capture when it was screened on Turner Classic Movies several years ago. I don't remember being really impressed by it at all. I remember it had political content and a kind of feminist bent.
It took me a couple of times to get started into the Criterion release of this film that is a part of the Post War Kurosawa boxed set. I kind of cringed in the first few scenes where Setsuko Hara appears as Yukie a professor's daughter full of wanton desire for Noge, a radical firebrand of a student (Susumo Fujito) much to consternation of the more conservative and conventional Itokawa. A scene where she plays a furious and pounding version of Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition expressing a mix of frustration and desire is so over the top it reminds me of the piano player in Refer Madness. I had a feeling I was going to truly hate this woman by the time the film is over.
But it turns out that Yukie's story is one of the most interesting depictions of evolving political and personal conscience I've encountered in film. The tale begins in 1933 where her father is under fire for his outspoken views on Japan's invasion of Manchuria. It ends at the time the contemporaneously when film was made, a time when "the war was lost but freedom is restored" as its intertitle to its coda sequence announces. What happens in between is a story of growth, love, espionage, sorrow, harassment, reconciliation and birth. No Regrets For Our Youth is a kind of epic where the main character is transformed. It makes me wonder if my initial reaction to Yukie is mostly about the kind of character she was at the film's outset.
No Regrets is Kurosawa's first film after WWII and is based on a a real life incidents where a Kyoto professor was forced from his teaching position due to supposedly harboring "Communist thoughts" and his student was subsequently executed for being part of the ring led by Russian spy Donald Sorage. In The Films of Akira Kurosawa, Donald Richie maintains that Kurosawa was more interested in the story of one of social oppression vs. one where he was politically motivated to explore on film. Regardless, there is no doubt that there is a lot of passion and outrage even in this movie.
In a weird kind of connection, this viewing of No Regrets For Our Youth makes me want to go back and watch Warren Beatty's Reds or even Bertolucci's 1900 because both, like No Regrets are twentieth century political epics with strong elements of character studies. How's that for a sub-sub genre?
posted by well-executed buffet at 2:24 AM
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