Takekurabe

It's the Meiji era! With the shogunate gone -- even though the women still sing about it while sewing -- and Japan unified under the Emperor, great things are in store for Japan. For the villagers in a small town, though, things are tough. Being a monk is not a good profession any more. Schoolkids form gangs to battle gangs from other schools. A budding young woman faces the choice of becoming a concubine or a prostitute, despite her brother's protest.

Japan's New Wave was in the process of forming and screaming about everything that mature film makers like Mizoguchi and Kurosawa were doing, seemingly unaware the old guard was using these films to comment on on current conditions. Mean Heinosuke Gosho, who had been making features for 35 years at this point, made this one, just as he had made shomin-gekkim in the 1930s. His characters live and suffer and sometimes grow. And sometimes they disappear into the another world, never to be seen again.

The films of Gosho are known both from his sensible composition as well as his continuous, insightful interpretation of the present moment. Though he was a pioneer of shomin-geki films in the 1930's, his post-war films full of humanism tightly tie him as a man of his time. In the 1950's, he had a creative period, where he produced such important works as "Entotsu no mieru basho" (Where Chimneys Are Seen, 1953), "Osaka no yado" (An Inn in Osaka, 1954) and "Kiiroi karasu" (Yellow Crow, 1957) in rapid succession. All these masterworks are tales of the post-war, yet the film-maker behind them also ventured towards period settings once in awhile.

Though it would be easy to view a film like "Takekurabe" (Growing Up Twice, 1955) as a brake for Gosho from the contemporary societal depictions, the mentality of 1950's Japan has clearly inspired him to make the film. In the post-war decades, Japanese people were terrified about the cost of the country's militarization and the devastation of war. This recent past was now taboo, and yet the people needed a period of time to base their national feeling to. For many, the Meiji period (1868 - 1912) looked appealing. During those decades, Japan modernized itself to compete with western nations, cities grew bigger and new innovations made life more pleasant.

Gosho's film is set in 1897, and shows the other side of things. His vision of the Meiji - based on a short story - is anything but nice. The film follows a number of young people, unusual choice for Gosho, who rarely depicted teenagers. The film shows how tough and even hopeless life could be for those who happened to be poor - or happened to be female. The poor girls of the film are either being sold, or become geishas just like their sisters did before them. For boys, life is not good either, as social injustice intervenes in their life choices. There is a heavy presence of authorities, whether paternal, religious or class-based, and I don't believe we get a single pretty image all throughout the film, another clear departure for the usually very picturesque director.

In the film's bleak reality, growing up means accepting the fact that you can't alter your own fate. The nation, too, is growing up, and the film expresses concern about the direction. The intentions of the film are nobler than the end result. Gosho is one of my favorites, but I don't find his few period films to match the level of his other work. This is more overall, less detailed, more angry and less ambiguous. Acting is okay, but perhaps the narrative would have worked better had it been clearly tied to one character, instead of being a generational depiction.