an unholy trio
by Douglas Messerli
Nagisa Oshima and Tamura Tsutoma
(writers), Nagisa Oshima (director) 少年 Shōnen (Boy) / 1969
Nagisa
Oshima’s 1969 film Boy was based on a
real story from the newspapers about a family that used one of their young
sons, called “boy” throughout the
film, to scam
unsuspecting drivers by pretending they have hit him; after threatening to go
to the police, the father and mother generally receive “off the record”
payments from these frightened individuals.
The father (Fumio Watanabe), a former Japanese
veteran, claims that he cannot work, and, accordingly, needs to stage these
scams in order to survive. But his second wife (Akiko Koyama), pregnant with
what would be their third child, is determined not to get an abortion, and
dreams of saving enough money to begin living a normal life.
Fearful of being discovered, the family
keeps on the move, with the father finally living separately, possibly having
affairs with other women and returning only for further scams and abuse of his
wife.
Several times the boy attempts to escape
to their original home city, but doesn’t have enough money to make the entire
trip, and each time returns to
dysfunctional
family unit.
After Oshima’s Brechtian films such as Death by Hanging and Violence at Noon, Boy seemed to some critics to be a tamer move into documentary
territory. But the director’s use of red lenses to symbolize the boy’s
connection with the mother, his switch back and forth from black-and-white to
full color, and his almost dispassionate objectivity of the suffering family,
actually transforms this work into a more experimental consideration of social
conditions in Japanese society and, as in many of Oshima’s films, focuses on
that culture’s effects of World War II.
And when the family is finally tracked
down by the police and a doctor is called for the young boy’s wounds, who
reports he may have to amputee the child, the boy fatalistically cries out “Go ahead, cut 'em off!” Clearly the aliens of his world
have won the battle for his young life.
Los Angeles, January 29, 2017
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