Obscure Japanese Film #199
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Mie Kitahara |
Following on from the commercial success earlier in 1956 of their films Season of the Sun and Crazed Fruit, this was Nikkatsu’s stab at a female-centred ‘sun tribe’ movie - ‘sun tribe’ being a term adopted by the Japanese press in reference to the first film to describe what was then a new phenomenon: rebellious, spoilt teenagers, generally from wealthy families, who despised the older generation and were unapologetically interested only in gratifying their own desires. Like Season of the Sun, this one was directed by Takumi Furukawa, a lesser director than Ko Nakahira, who had made Crazed Fruit, the female star of which was Mie Kitahara, who stars again here.
Kitahara plays Reiko, a student who shares a dormitory with other female students and who, in this case, does not seem to be from a wealthy family or even to have a family – certainly no reference is made to one, and she has to take on various part-time jobs to get by. What marks Reiko out as different is her attitude to sex – she likes to take the initiative and, early on in the film, she makes advances to a male student, Maki (Shoji Yasui), literally throwing herself at him and biting the button off his jacket. The two begin having a relationship, but one in which traditional roles are reversed – in this case, it’s the man who wants marriage and complains that she only loves him for his body, while she wants no commitment, only to have a good time. Reiko also has a one-night stand with Teramura (Kyoji Aoyama), incurring the wrath of his fiancé / her classmate Motoko (Misako Watanabe) as a result. But it’s when she begins tutoring a young boy at his home and seduces his father (Hiroshi Nihonyanagi) that she really begins playing with fire…
Whereas the previous two films had been based on stories by Shintaro Ishihara, the source for Gyakukosen was a novel of the same name by Kunie Iwahashi (1934-2014). Apparently, on its publication (also in 1956), there was ‘a frenzy of media coverage of her as the female equivalent of Ishihara’ (Japanese Wikipedia).
Although it may seem like fairly tame stuff today, there’s no doubt that the sexual frankness of this film and the carefully-calculated moments of uninhibited sensuality on Reiko’s part (another example being the scene in which she takes a drink of water from Teramura’s mouth at a drinking fountain) would have been quite shocking at the time. The problem with the film is that it comes across less as a heartfelt plea for sexual equality and more like a cynically motivated product designed to stir up controversy and extract as many yen as possible from the pockets of Japanese teenagers. The sun tribe genre proved to be extremely short-lived as there was some evidence that a number of rapes and sexual assaults had been committed by youngsters influenced by the films. This led to protests by concerned parents and teachers, who were successful in having the genre effectively banned by the end of the year. As Liam Grealy and Catherine Driscoll point out in an online article, there were really only five sun tribe films proper, all of which were released in 1956, the other two being Kon Ichikawa’s Punishment Room and Hiromichi Horikawa’s Summer in Eclipse.
One oddity of this film is that it features a great deal of group singing of Russian folk songs by the young people, presumably a reflection of the fact that communism had become popular in Japan during the post-war years and had inspired an interest in Russian culture. Gyakukosen is largely unremarkable in terms of cinematic craft – the ending is really the only part that is visually memorable – and probably only of interest to fans of Mie Kitahara or anyone with an interest in the sun tribe phenomenon.