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Based on a story by Leonard Schrader, who also wrote “Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters” and “The Man Who Stole the Sun”, “P.P. Rider” shares many similarities with “Sailor Suit and Machine Gun” particularly in the way it combines school students with yakuza. It is also worth mentioning that Somai's initial cut was four hours long, but he had to cut it in half in order to be presented as a double feature with “Urusei Yatsura: Only You”.

P. P Rider is screening on Metrograph

The film starts with a rather impressive long sequence which introduces us to the main characters and the event that the story centers on, with the chaos that ensues from the beginning essentially setting the tone for the whole movie. Nobunaga Deguchi seems to be the most obese kid in his classroom in highschool, but he also happens to be its bully, as...

From the late ’50s and into the 1970s the Japanese New Wave exhibited an incredible creative outburst that defined and shaped what we consider contemporary Japanese cinema. But most studious critics have labeled what came after, the 1980s, as the “lost decade” of Japanese filmmaking, where no major directors or movements came to the forefront in either the home country or worldwide. Nevertheless, there’s been a recent surge of reconsideration of that period, mainly through retrospectives and restorations, like the one put together by Japan Society on Shinji Somai, one of the most important, eclectic directors who got his start in that epoch.

“Rites of Passage: The Films of Shinji Somai” features seven of the director’s early features, made between 1981 and 1990, which cemented his style. As the name of the retrospective and its accompanying description by its programmers hint, Somai cut his teeth into the seishun eiga (youth film) genre,...