Eine Stadt der Liebe und Hoffnung

I caught this on TCM in December of 2021. Researching the film online proved frustrating. The title has several translations, including Street of Hope and Love. According to trivia, the director wanted to title the film The Boy Who Sold His Pigeon but was overruled by the film studio's executives.

Don't let its taut running time fool you: this film contains multiple layers of thought-provoking elements in a small package. It's well written. The cast does a fine job. The direction is very good, as is the cinematography and art direction, especially the location scouting. If I were to make one critique, it would be that the music didn't particularly seem fitting at times.

The basic story is about a teenage girl from a wealthy family who wants to help a poor boy by hooking him up with a job opportunity. To describe more would be to give away spoilers. It's important to know up front that it's not an uplifting film. One bit of trivia I learned, assuming it's true, is that the studio suspended the director for six months once they learned the movie was not the feel-good family film they were expecting.

Hiroshi Fujikawa has a scam of selling his sister's pet pigeons, knowing they will fly back if they get the chance. He's done it before and expects to do it again. His family is desperately poor. His mother is a shoe shine, but is sick and cannot work, and welfare does not pay enough for them to live on. His mother wants him to go to high school, and his teacher, Kakuko Chino, understands her desire and their plight.

Fujikawa has sold the pigeons this time to Yuki Tominaga. Her younger brother is sick, and never likes the gifts she brings, When Miss Chino finds out about the pigeon scam, she explains to Miss Tominaga, who tries to get Fujikawa a job at her father's company. Her elder brother, Fumio Watanabe, begins a courtship with Miss Chino.

Nagisa Ôshima's first movie as a director is an overt and strident study of class warfare in the new Japan of rich businessmen and the poverty stricken. set in the industrial sections of Tokyo. Although I thought the ending a bit over the top, it's a cleanly written and performed movie with something to say.

Writer/director Nagisa Oshima's first feature film (a short one at just over an hour) was released in 1959, and is a humanist, neorealist tale - a social drama mainly set in a poor, industrial, working class area of Tokyo. Here teenage street peddler Masao sells his pet pigeon to passers-by knowing that it will (probably) fly home to the family nest so he can sell it again to somebody else. Complications ensue when one of the people he sells his pigeon to - a wealthy young woman called Kyoko - takes an interest in him, and his teacher Miss Akiyama tries to improve Masao's job prospects by finding him work with an electronics corporation, subsequently falling in love with the son, Yuji, of one of the corporation directors, who also happens to be the brother of Kyoko. Oh dear! Sounds a bit like a convoluted, soapy melodrama, and indeed in it's last quarter it does have bursts of melodramatics. Filmed in black and white, and originally titled 'The Boy Who Sold His Pigeon', this is a slightly confused 'moral tale' about the haves and have nots of the so called 'Japanese economic miracle', touching on themes of exploitative employment policies (seemingly designed to keep the workers down), poverty (Masao's sick single mum and his deaf little sister Yasue), education as a possible escape, and the lack of ethics of a society which contaminates people with it's corruption and inhumanity by turning them into swindlers. "You can't live on sympathy alone", as Kyoko and Yuji's corporation director father says at one point. Or live without it. Not bad, but overall rather average as a film.

Pretty good study of class division in Japan, circa 1959. I was especially pleased that the film's title turns out to be ironic. Less pleased with the general air of stolidity and humorlessness that you often find in Japanese art house cinema (Ozu notably excepted). Could have used more of the sardonic female shoeshine workers and less of the extremely dull love story sub plot involving the dedicated high school teacher, a character on whom you can usually count in films to be a bore, and the young CEO. B minus.