Two things in this life that will drive any person crazy: love and youth. Put them together and it makes a bomb that blows up in pretty much everyone’s face at some point. Zero confidence, awkwardness with the opposite sex, discomfort in one’s own skin and no experience with the kind of pain that love gone wrong brings can all add up to something real ugly when the weather’s just right. I don’t miss being 17. I’ll take the bills and the bosses and baldness over that shit anytime.
That’s why I like this Japanese juvenile delinquent classic. It bounces to jazz, is hopped up on teen rebellion and is cynical about the whole thing. You can tell early on that this story of two brothers who fall for the same girl isn’t going to end warm and fuzzy. One brother is a real sly dog who’s been laid before and has a presence that women notice; the other brother is a rank dork with bad posture and virginity gleaming in his eyes. As for the girl, she has her own problems for which all possible resolutions are tricky and painful.
The brothers are rich kids, symbols of Japan’s new taiyozoku, or “sun tribe”, the disaffected post-war youth who grew up without their elders’ nationalist education, and thus don’t trust them, while at the same time enjoying the country’s economic upswing. They’re in a gang who hang out by the ocean all day and, in a great scene early in the film that distinguishes this from other 1950s flicks about the young and wild, have decided that boredom is their credo. Their boredom is the light to their fuse and the only thing that they can call their own.
Meanwhile, director Kō Nakahira isn’t bored with any of these characters. He enjoys each one, even though they’re all jerks. His treatment of sex—we get the prefaces and the aftermaths—are strikingly erotic with mere sprinkles of flesh and suggestion. The kids may be bored, but that only makes their feelings of lust all the more potent. It’s powerful relief. It’s something to believe in. It can be devastating when it all goes wrong. Then comes the amazing sucker punch ending that will shake anyone out of their teen dreams.