29-03-2025
‘Boy': An ambitious portrait of alienated youth
In 1999, commercial director Yuji Dan started work on his first feature. 'Boy' was an ambitious youth drama and state-of-the-nation address inspired by the Japanese government's controversial move that year to give legal recognition to the country's national flag and anthem. Evoking the radical spirit of Japan's Art Theatre Guild and the New Hollywood movement, it was a film that sounded great on paper. The only problem was, its creator couldn't seem to finish it.
Dan shot 'Boy' intermittently until 2003 and screened a rough cut of the movie at Germany's Nippon Connection festival in 2007. It then languished for the best part of two decades, before the director finally managed to complete the damn thing.
The film's tortuous gestation has imbued it with an aura of mystery, suggesting a homegrown answer to Francis Ford Coppola's 'Megalopolis' (did I mention that 'Boy' is also three hours long?). Yet it's more curate's egg than lost classic, albeit a fascinating time capsule from a troubled moment in the country's not-so-distant past.
A young Katsuya Kobayashi (now a director himself) plays the film's 16-year-old protagonist, Jun. When he refuses to stand up and sing the national anthem at his high-school graduation ceremony, the star pupil doesn't intend it to be a political statement. But that's how everyone else — including his teachers and the school's Marxist cabal — chooses to interpret it, sending him on a downward spiral that he does little to resist.
A chance encounter with Nozomi (Aimi Nakamura), a young woman who's been forced into prostitution by her father, leads Jun further astray. As he moves from minor transgressions to full-blown delinquency, including a brief spell hanging out with uyoku (ultra-rightists), his family life also starts to crumble. Even as he's going off the rails, however, Jun continues to look after his bedridden grandfather — a shell-shocked veteran for whom World War II never ended — and pay regular visits to a hikikomori (shut-in) friend.
Jun's increasingly nihilistic journal entries ('Nobody understands me,' et cetera) are a reminder that, even as he adopts a tough carapace, he's still just a teenager. Or, similarly, his adulation for an adolescent pop star, Myu (Maiko Tomeoku), which turns toxic after she announces her retirement and marriage to a much older man.
TV news clips provide a background chorus on the litany of problems that Japan was facing at the time, including a wave of violent youth crime. However, as 'Boy' makes abundantly clear, appealing to old-fashioned values and the Hinomaru flag aren't going to solve anything.
Much of the most interesting material comes during the film's pungent first hour, which surveys the fallout from Jun's initial (and misunderstood) act of defiance. An elderly Seijun Suzuki makes a cameo appearance in the unlikely role of an uyoku guru, while the cast also includes Mariko Tsutsui as Jun's restive mother.
After Jun elopes with Nozomi, 'Boy' settles into a more familiar lovers-on-the-run narrative that's less enthralling, even before it devolves into outright melodrama. Three hours is a long time to spend in the company of this film, with visuals, seemingly shot on consumer-grade cameras, that seldom rise above the level of a daytime TV drama.
However, it's worth sticking around for the bleak, raging finale. If nothing else, anyone who makes it to the end of 'Boy' should have plenty to talk about.
