review for Cruel Story of Youth on AllMovie

With the savage fury of a cry from hell, this landmark Japanese teen drama is a brutal, scathing attack on the moral and cultural vacuity of Japan's newfound affluence after World War II. Cruel Story of Youth has widely been compared to Rebel Without a Cause; like Nicholas Ray's film, it features disillusioned teens rebelling against everything without really understanding why. Unlike its American counterpart, Cruel Story of Youth is unrelentingly dark and gritty, depicting mindless or coerced sex and brutal violence in a chillingly offhand manner. Made at a time when the restrained sentimentality of Yasujiro Ozu or existential humanism of Akira Kurosawa were the norm, this film shocks because of the social taboos it transgresses and the amount of venom it directs towards Japanese society. In style and politics, it bears a strong resemblance to Jean-Luc Godard's French New Wave masterpiece Breathless, released a year earlier. Both films gleefully subverted well-worn genres for their own political and aesthetic ends; and both employed a fresh, defiant style based on the hand-held camera. The success of Cruel Story of Youth ushered in the Japanese New Wave and established Nagisa Oshima as one of Japan's most prominent and daring directors.