Who’s Cruel and Who’s Young in Cruel Story of Youth?
I’m usually quite vehemently opposed to “horrible people doing horrible things” cinema, as I find that to basically be torture porn, but Nagisa Ōshima makes atrocities on display compelling because of the meaning he injects and the sheer force of nature that is his directing. Witnessing an Ōshima film is always quite an experience – his films are mysterious in morals and meaning, yet also clear in construction and conviction. That tension between ambiguity and clarity permeates his second feature, Cruel Story of Youth (1960). The lingering question I had while watching it was “who’s the titular ‘cruel’?”, and the answer kept changing shape and position. We start the movie thinking the rapist must be the cruel one, but the answer slowly expands to men as a whole then to American-influenced capitalist society. Ōshima has smartly centered his focus on a woman instead of the awful men surrounding her; men are just evil of the worst kind in this film. For a ...