Boy

A film that takes place on the roads of Japan. There is a family. The father was wounded in the war, does not work, and blames his wife; the stepmother is young and pregnant; their son is ten. Their means of living is set. The woman waits at the roadside, throws herself in front of an oncoming car, and is lightly hurt. The driver panics. The family offers not to go to the police and takes money in return. Then the pregnancy makes it impossible for her. The boy's turn comes. From there the film is a story of the road. A city, a hotel, the next city; the family keeps moving to avoid being caught. The boy learns well. He knows which car will stop, how to fall, and when to cry. What the narrative is interested in is not crime but the child's loneliness: nobody explains to him what he is doing and he invents a story for himself; he decides he is a hero from space. His little brother's line hurts. The small child follows him everywhere and understands none of it. One accident really does go wrong. In the north, in snow, a red glove and a snowman; the film changes entirely after that section. The source is a real case. The arrest of a family in Japan living by a similar method had been in the newspapers, and the screenplay came out of that report. The use of colour is deliberate. Some sections are almost colourless, some are washed into a single hue, and red always stands as a signal. Tetsuo Abe, Fumio Watanabe and Akiko Koyama are in the cast. Nagisa Ōshima directed. Who it is for: anyone who likes the Japanese New Wave and hard family narratives. Who it is not for: anyone who cannot carry pain built through a child; the narrative offers consolation nowhere.