cabbages and onions
by Douglas Messerli
Susumu
Hani and Shūji Terayama (screenplay), Susumu Hani (director) Hatsukoi: Jigoku-hen (Nanami: The Inferno of First Love) /
1968, USA 1969
The audience for this film, accordingly,
might expect from the rest of the film, subtitled “The Inferno of First Love,”
a story of a poignant love-affair, a blossoming of a relationship between the
two that characterizes both the heart-break and delights of first loves.
Although Nanami and Shun agree to meet again, however, that meeting never takes
place, and what follows, in the context of the simple portrayal of youthful love
we have just witnessed, is startling. It may help one to know that when this
film first appeared in the US it was paired, at least in New York City, with
the porn classic Deep Throat at the World 49th Street Theater, a
fact seemingly unimaginable given the scene I have just described.
Indeed director Hani moves the story
carefully forward in two directions, with an almost idyllic portrayal of the
young hero’s encounter with a female toddler in a park, whom he has described
as his only other girlfriend to Nanami. The child, who accidentally has
encountered the boy, is obviously delighted with his gentle ways and his
willingness to play games with her and read to her. At the game of riddles, the
child stumps him with her question that entails the difference between cabbages
and onions: if when you peal a cabbage you are left with the core, what are you
left with after peeling an onion? The utterly clueless boy cannot answer.
Although the boy’s and the child’s
friendship obviously is completely innocent, we sense something amiss about his
willingness to devote so much time to her company. There is quite clearly
something a bit stunted about his behavior. But, at first, we dismiss this,
particularly when Hani also serves up a long scene where the boy and his
stepfather sit in the older man’s studio both rhythmically tapping against
pieces of metal, a perfect example, so it seems, of a loving elder and his
appreciative apprentice.
Another scene portrays Shun, again in the
park with his young toddler-friend, but this time intimating a much more pedophiliac
relationship as he holds her close as she urinates. Observed by park
bystanders, who assume the gestures represent sexual acts, he is chased from the park,
attacked and arrested, ending up in an equally perverse psychiatric session
where he is hypnotized, injected with sodium pentothal, and forced to remember
not only those recent dramatic events, but his own early sodomizing by his
“saintly” adoptive father, his adoptive mother crying out for a stop to the
procedures.
Despite these clearly torrid aspects of
both of their lives, the young couple still attempt to make a date, but as
Nanami is more and more enveloped in the pornographic world in which she is
involved, Shun—clearly in need of alternatives to his own haunted
memories—becomes jealous as he is forced to follow her into greater and greater
degrees of degradation. An innocent meeting with a fellow classmate, a nerdy
boy from her schooldays she has nicknamed Algebra, is transformed into a kind
of torture for Shun as he tags along with the two, attending a graduation
ceremony at a school where both he and Nanami are made fun of for their
obviously outré clothing and
behavior.
Yet, here again, Hani surprises the viewer
by transforming Algebra’s sentimentalized and badly done film about his own
“first love” into something that Shun suddenly perceives as a meaningful work
of art, a movie which has found significant to his own life; as the two share
their mutual admiration of Algebra’s clumsy expression, Nanami, presented by
Shun with the child’s riddle, easily solves it: what you get by peeling an
onion is tears.
Both, indeed, must face further pain and
humiliation before they can even possibly embrace the new world they promise one
another. On a day-time shoot at the beach, Nanami observes, from afar, her
polite businessman photographer who has showered her with gifts joyfully
spending a day with his wife (whom he has described as someone he desires to
beat) and his two young boys, barbecuing fish. Never before has she observed
the man so enjoying himself.
No matter, he is on his way to the hotel
to meet his “first” and only love, Nanami. But along the way he encounters the
Yakuza and his thugs, who attempt to pay him to reveal Nanami’s address. Running
from them in absolute horror—and in terror perhaps of all his memories present
and past—he is struck by a car and killed. Nanami, upon hearing the commotion,
comes to the hotel window to observe her potential lover’s body below.
Combining the radical opposing genres of a
love story, an idyll, a surrealist nightmare, a 1960s documentary, and a
naturalistic parable, Nanami: The Inferno
of First Love, is just what its subtitle suggests, a recounting of a
hellish-like furnace where lives are determined less by desire and will than
they are by all the little hits and taps that mold any malleable being into
something he or she would prefer not to have become.
Los Angeles, May
14, 2012
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