Kinoshita Keisuke was Shochiku's second most prestigious director, after Ozu. In terms of filmmaking, they are in many ways polar opposites. Ozu's way of crafting films is stylistically coherent, while no two Kinoshita films are exactly alike. This makes the latter's filmography a continuously interesting one, but also bumpy and qualitatively variable. In 1959, Shochiku was in crisis financially. No longer the biggest-grossing studio, but actually the fifth biggest, it was felt that the studio's core emphasis on home-dramas and warm humanism did not resonate with the post-war generation. Then again the older filmmakers like Kinoshita (47 in 1959) did not feel comfortable with the modern way of filling films with sex and violence.
"Sekishunchô" (Farewell to Spring, 1959) is the director's effort to build a bridge between the generations, his depiction of the post-war generation. Thematically and in terms of the subject, it may seem worlds apart from what is customary for the director, but not necessarily. Like his other 1959 film "Kazabana" (The Snow Flurry), the best thing about "Sekishunchô" is the beautiful color cinematography by Kusuda Hiroshi. Aesthetically this is a beautiful film to watch. Narratively, is when we run into problems. It was a big trend in Japan during the 50's to adapt literature, even difficult literature, to film. I expected this to be a literary adaptation, due to the sheer amount of characters and sub-plots almost bringing to mind Tolstoy's "War and Peace". The film is also very serious and dry, which is often the case when adapting literature. Yet this is actually an original screenplay by Kinoshita, which guides one to view it more critically. In an adaptation, you can point at something that should not be in the film, and reason that it's there because it's in the book. An original screenplay however doesn't have that excuse.
The film is about five childhood friends (Kawazu Yusuke, Tsugawa Masahiko, Kosaka Kazuya, Ishihama Akira & Yamamoto Toyozo) who meet at a small mountain village named Aizu, three years after graduating from school together. They are initially glad to meet each other after the long separation, but things quickly turn sour as they discover how much they have drifted apart. All of them have shadows looming over them, and gradually we get to know their backgrounds. It's not a bad idea to watch this film with a notebook to write down the details, and to keep track which character is which. Through this depiction, Kinoshita is going for a generational depiction, and to offer a realistic view of the problems for younger people. Apparently though, Shochiku didn't think that five new-comer actors could carry a film or make it marketable, so the big stars Sada Keiji and Arima Ineko have been added, and have a small side-plot. They are marketed as the leads of this film, but are in it only briefly.
The film has a weird feel to it, due to the way Kinoshita frames the role of tradition in the lives of these young men. There is a theme song about White Tiger Warriors who committed a group suicide centuries ago, and this song is repeatedly sung by the lead characters. If the film otherwise attempts to create a realistic, unsentimental feel to the narrative, it is destroyed by the manner in which the characters feel anachronistically old-fashioned and tradition-oriented. Kinoshita's films frequently show tradition as a burden, and this is not one of his better takes on the subject. The film feels crushingly heavy, because of the amount of narrative that is crammed in it. Yet it also feels stagnated, as the progress for individual characters seems non-existing. The amount of characters also makes them less interesting as individuals.
When it finally comes to an end, it is difficult to gather, what the intended message of the film was. So in the end, for the hit and miss director Kinoshita is, this for me is clearly a miss. (I would say that it's an interesting experiment if the film wasn't so boring.)
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