How is it that every so often I can still stumble across a film I’ve never heard of, a director with a massive catalog that has escaped me and even an entire genre of film history that I was completely unaware of?
This week, that genre was the Japanese New Wave, and the film was Koreyoshi Kurahara’s “The Warped Ones” from 1960, a bizarre teenage drama about a pair of young men who are released from prison and proceed to wreck havoc in whatever way suits their fancy. They spot the man who sent them to jail walking down a boardwalk with his girlfriend, and the two kidnap the woman and rape her on the beach. After the ordeal, she tracks down our young anti-hero and confides in him that her relationship has forever been damaged until he too suffers a mental breakdown.
“The Warped Ones” is a film about identity and the animalistic impulses that we’re driven to when faced with reality, but at its core it’s an avant-garde art film about youth and rebelling against culture in the same way that the French New Wave films of Jean-Luc Godard and Francois Truffaut are. The Japanese New Wave borrowed the title from the French, and the common criticism has been that they also borrowed the style and original ideas from France as well.
But what other critics have observed more fully is that the genre developed and emerged simultaneously with the French, and although the Japanese lacked the auteur theory to go along with the film movement, these films were drastically different from the Western influenced Kurosawa films and the more stately works by Ozu and Mizoguchi. Continue reading “Rapid Response: The Warped Ones and The Japanese New Wave”