*Some spoilers*
Made and released during the American occupation of Japan, NO REGRETS FOR OUR YOUTH is an intriguing albeit somewhat flawed early effort from Akira Kurosawa, offering rare insight into his worldview and autobiography, while also hinting at the many future masterpieces that would soon make him a cinematic legend.
**SPOILER ALERT**
Much of the convoluted story occurs in an academic, intellectual setting centered on Yukie (Setsuko Hara), a somewhat sheltered and spoiled college student, and the daughter of a college professor. Her father had once been something of an idealist, but, having settled into comfortable university tenure, has grown more apolitical with the passage of time. Yukie is largely oblivious to events around her (the increasingly fascist drift of Japanese politics) until she meets, falls in love with and marries popular communist student activist Noge (Susumu Fujita), who is the only son of an impoverished farming family. With very little warning, Noge is arrested, and dies while in police custody. Grief-stricken, Yukie first withdraws, and then abandons her otherwise-comfortable urban life to take up residence with Noge's embittered family. Working as a rice farmer, she slowly gains their respect and admiration.
NO REGRETS is among the only one of Kurosawa's films with a female protagonist, and is considerably more florid in its' melodrama than most of his films, but nonetheless is still a bit more obviously personal as a college student, Kurosawa scandalized his family by becoming an art student and flirting with far-left ideologies, before taking a low-wage entry-level job at a film company. With the beginning of the occupation, Kurosawa was free to abandon the positive, nationalistic themes that wartime Japanese censors imposed upon the studios. The end result was an intriguing mix of melodrama lots of tears, tears, more tears, and backbreaking work in NO REGRETS and a nuanced utopian idea: the educated and middle-classes can only truly know themselves (simultaneously gaining the respect of rural peasants) through some soul-defining manual labor. Here, that ideology is refreshingly un-strident, and the idealists of NO REGRETS are also individualists which in a truly utopian socialist society would be a 'contradiction' Yukie's choice of going to the country is voluntary, as was the idealistic activism of Noge. The value of individualism over ideological purity (or consensus) would soon emerge as a major theme running through Kurosawa's work as he turned away from the overt leftism of his youth, his protagonists (and antagonists) would increasingly take the form of noble - if limited - individualists: the dying bureaucrat of IKIRU, the self-absorbed ronin of YOJIMBO, the country doctor of RED BEARD, the ambitious executive suddenly paralyzed by a crippling dilemma in HIGH & LOW.
Stylistic devices well-used in later Kurosawa films were also fine-tuned here: the beautiful, sun-drenched intensity of the opening scenes clearly hints towards RASHOMON, and the deluges Yukie works through after moving to the country are an early example of Kurosawa's famed fondness for using extremes of nature to underscore characters' emotional state.
Made and released during the American occupation of Japan, NO REGRETS FOR OUR YOUTH is an intriguing albeit somewhat flawed early effort from Akira Kurosawa, offering rare insight into his worldview and autobiography, while also hinting at the many future masterpieces that would soon make him a cinematic legend.
**SPOILER ALERT**
Much of the convoluted story occurs in an academic, intellectual setting centered on Yukie (Setsuko Hara), a somewhat sheltered and spoiled college student, and the daughter of a college professor. Her father had once been something of an idealist, but, having settled into comfortable university tenure, has grown more apolitical with the passage of time. Yukie is largely oblivious to events around her (the increasingly fascist drift of Japanese politics) until she meets, falls in love with and marries popular communist student activist Noge (Susumu Fujita), who is the only son of an impoverished farming family. With very little warning, Noge is arrested, and dies while in police custody. Grief-stricken, Yukie first withdraws, and then abandons her otherwise-comfortable urban life to take up residence with Noge's embittered family. Working as a rice farmer, she slowly gains their respect and admiration.
NO REGRETS is among the only one of Kurosawa's films with a female protagonist, and is considerably more florid in its' melodrama than most of his films, but nonetheless is still a bit more obviously personal as a college student, Kurosawa scandalized his family by becoming an art student and flirting with far-left ideologies, before taking a low-wage entry-level job at a film company. With the beginning of the occupation, Kurosawa was free to abandon the positive, nationalistic themes that wartime Japanese censors imposed upon the studios. The end result was an intriguing mix of melodrama lots of tears, tears, more tears, and backbreaking work in NO REGRETS and a nuanced utopian idea: the educated and middle-classes can only truly know themselves (simultaneously gaining the respect of rural peasants) through some soul-defining manual labor. Here, that ideology is refreshingly un-strident, and the idealists of NO REGRETS are also individualists which in a truly utopian socialist society would be a 'contradiction' Yukie's choice of going to the country is voluntary, as was the idealistic activism of Noge. The value of individualism over ideological purity (or consensus) would soon emerge as a major theme running through Kurosawa's work as he turned away from the overt leftism of his youth, his protagonists (and antagonists) would increasingly take the form of noble - if limited - individualists: the dying bureaucrat of IKIRU, the self-absorbed ronin of YOJIMBO, the country doctor of RED BEARD, the ambitious executive suddenly paralyzed by a crippling dilemma in HIGH & LOW.
Stylistic devices well-used in later Kurosawa films were also fine-tuned here: the beautiful, sun-drenched intensity of the opening scenes clearly hints towards RASHOMON, and the deluges Yukie works through after moving to the country are an early example of Kurosawa's famed fondness for using extremes of nature to underscore characters' emotional state.