NEW 35MM PRINT!

Cruel Story of Youth proved the seminal work, the Breathless, of the Japanese New Wave. “One of Oshima’s best films,” pronounced the formidable Japanese film critic Tadao Sato, who said this epoch-making work – its shocking ending was widely decried – made Oshima “the darling of the age.” Never more beautiful (or crueler!) than in this recently struck print, which emphasizes its sublime riot of retro – hot neon, red, blue, and turquoise telephones, rockabilly, teased, shellacked hair, a V-neck terry towel T-shirt to die for – Cruel Story of Youth  focuses on a couple of teenage lovers who declare: “We have no dreams, so we won’t see them destroyed.” Emblems of the alienated youth culture that had emerged in Japan, the two rebels lounge in sleazy bars, make love in brackish industrial backwaters, roar through Tokyo on a motorcycle, attempting to achieve total freedom but finding only its opposite.  Full of virtuoso sequences which feature Oshima’s innovative use of hand-held camera and decentered compositions within the widescreen frame, Story makes for a vertiginous visual experience that reflects the disoriented, precarious quality of his characters’ lives. The Number One Essential Oshima, according to Chuck Stephens in Film Comment: “Oshima’s second feature is as lurid and full-fistedly tabloid as anything by Sam Fuller.”