Nanami, First Love

I've just seen this film in a rare cinema screening. It's difficult to comment on this film. There are so many disparate elements and themes. Perhaps what the director was trying to do was create a portrait of a society in a time and a place that was antithetical to love. How can the young love of our two heroes (Shun and Nanami) be succoured by a society that has embraced the commodification of sexuality (including the sexual commodification of children), and rigid glacial patriarchalism. The ending of the movie underlines this (but I won't give it away).

Some of the absurd constipated behaviour of the Japanese is on full display here, Shun is so up-tight that he has to go to classes and be taught to laugh. Daisuke a high-school friend of Nanami shows a film in his university film club about his love for another girl at his high school, how he never managed to express it or have it recognised. It seems he barely even spoke to the object of his affection. He says that if she had just been beautiful that he would have been able to find another love. But by all accounts he was much more deeply attracted to her. They say that one's first love is always the strongest. For Daisuke it was so strong that it becomes hollow and obsessional, he will never love again.

Of course the beauty of this movie and its inventiveness marks it out as a very interesting film. Some of the shots are amazingly beautiful, their composition not entirely relevant to proceedings, almost cinematic asides (urban vistas, and graveyard scenes). It has a sense of atmosphere on a par with Rivette and Godard, and the film is much more dense and complex than films made by those two directors, or to be more accurate presents a portrait of a Japanese society profoundly more multi-textured than the France of the New Wave. A Japan at the crossroads between tradition and modernity both spiritually, intellectually, and socially.

At least in parts this movie is ambivalent, it portrays first love as foolish, obsessional and shallow and it also is sympathetic to the sadoerotic subculture (at least in places). But that's why it's so good, nothing is fed to you on a plate.

Director and creator of this movie, Susumu Hani was one of the directors who were known for his avant garde movie making style. There were others in his league such as Nagisa Ooshima, and Kiju Yoshida that formed Japanese New Wave cinema movement. Hani himself had an avant garde lifestyle getting divorced from his wife finding out that he was having an affair with her sister, and Hani later marrying the sister of his ex-wife.

Hatsukoi Jigokuhen was an experimental movie made in the late '60s when Japan was experiencing new culture movement influenced by the Hippie culture. Most of Japan's avant garde films are from this period.

This movie was made for the youth of the time. It depicts the difficulties that the youth were experiencing at the time such as college entrance exam, country girl coming to Tokyo and having to work as a nude model to supplement her income, and a boy who's relationship with her is his first love. Both Kuniko Iwai who played Nanami and Akio Takahashi who played Shun were new comers into the movie business. I believe the little girl who played Mami is Hani's own four year old daughter Mio Hani.

While other directors who were part of the avant garde movement were seriously seeking new forms of liberal expression with various success, I believe that Hani has bona fide insanity about his approach. The movie shows the underground culture that existed in Japan at the time, but there are segments that are not related to the story that borders on child porn, SM element in what goes on inside the underground clubs.

All of the avant garde movies that came out of Japan are very quiet. Conversations are all quiet and slow, and so is the progress of the story. And all talk about free spirited people, that in many ways live irresponsible lives. In the end the style seemed to have failed to set new direction, and people lost interest in this style of movie. Looking at them 40 years later is interesting in seeing the society of Japan during that time.

In line with a title like Nanami: The Inferno of First Love, this one is pretty grim overall. It's already a far from sunny look at love, but it delves into darker territory when it comes to exploring the histories of its two main characters, and in that sense, I feel this still has the capacity to shock.

It doesn't compromise and I guess I could call it a gutsy film. It sometimes feels like it's trying to be steamy, for lack of a better word, and that clashes with the more disturbing parts of the film. To what extent that was intentional and, if so, what purpose that was supposed to serve, I'm not sure. I guess that's the main reservation I have about Nanami: The Inferno of First Love.

It's one that's kind of impossible to recommend unless you like Japanese New Wave films (and that's a whole movement I have kind of mixed feelings about personally), but if you are and don't mind a disturbing and downbeat watch, then sure. Knock yourself out and ruin your day. It's only one day; you get plenty of them anyway. Hopefully.

You may find this hard to see. It is a Japanese "new wave," film. It has a story of course, but such things are largely irrelevant. I'll give it because you may not see it. (In my comments, I assume most folks have seen the film.)

A young man was abandoned as a child, and continuously molested by his adoptive father. He falls "in love" with a prostitute, around the same time he is imprisoned for molesting a four year old girl. We follow him and the prostitute (actually a "model") separately; that's most of the film, timewise. The story ends tragically.

Its shot with hand-held cameras, and even by today's standards the camera movements are obviously there to remind you that there is a camera present. Not your eyes, but a physical camera.

Following the French notion, the "new wave" ideas are followed: the fact that it is a film is explicit and films are referenced throughout the thing. And the elements of the story are abstracted — usually from the most raw and common experience, love — into something synthetic, which only can exists in cinema. These two elements were thought by the French create a new film narrative: not using the camera to place you in life, but the other way around, using life to allow you to travel to a new place, abstract, pure and effective within its own rules.

That French experiment collapsed, I think, because as a class, French intellectuals don't have much horsepower, so after we get the cleverness of us being placed in this synthetic world, we look for a reason to be there other than tourism from boredom. The Japanese, on the other hand, actually live is an abstract world, deliberately so. And its of much the same type — less now than 40-50 years ago (unless you count manga). By this I mean that the narrative they live in is close to the one they imagine, and they've had 1500 years of continuous stylization to abstract the narrative into a coherent collection of edges.

So when I encounter Japanese new wave films, or better, those that quote and extend the concept, I know I'm where the idea wanted to be, but was couldn't go there with its originators.

This one isn't powerful in the way the HongKongers Wong Kar Wai and Fruit Chan do, but it has oompf if you allow for the amazingly noticeable proscription on pubic hair — but that's part of the game.

Along the way, we have all sorts of side stories, as if they were movies within the movie. Some are flashbacks that are movies in the mind. Others are of the same type, but everyday events: a pocketknife is dropped; a foil gumwrapper blows in the wind.

And these are interspersed with overt films within. We have a film about first love our lovers attend. She is a model for filmed stories, always pornographic (but indicated here as topless cheesecake because of the censorship) and often violent. He purchases a record designed to have a conversation with him. Much of the action touches on or is in a graveyard, shown as a collection of storymarkers for the dead.

An item that permeates is a riddle. If you peel a cabbage, you get a core. If you peel an onion, what do you get? The film is intended to be a peeling of the onion. You'll need to watch the film (or email me) to get the answer to the riddle.

Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 3: Worth watching.

Is this a film about "first love"? No -- there's no warm delightful discovery here. Maybe the film about the impossibility of love...which is a bleak statement.

What we do get is very painful depiction of sexual trauma, and gratuitous -- but stylish -- depictions of sexual violence and pedophilia. If the viewer is hoping to see innocent joys, they are in for waaaay more than they bargained for.

I admire the director Hani's courage and inventiveness -- many risks are taken. But the transgressive material feels mostly tacked-on -- for example, it's ambiguous if the "photo-shoot party scene" is "about pornography", or is simply pornography.

In the end, Hani's courage to break moral norms is stronger than his emotional courage. The film fearlessly portrays trauma and perversion, but not the courage of love and ethics. A particular failure of the film is how flat the female lead is. She's cute and she smiles a lot. But she is not given a chance to become completely human. Instead we're left only with tears without meaning or ending.