No Regrets for Our Youth

Kyoto in the thirties. Yukie is a professor's daughter. Her father teaches at the university and speaks against the war; the ministry has him removed, the students resist and the protest is put down. There are two young men around her: one adjusts and becomes a prosecutor, the other goes on working underground. Yukie goes to Tokyo. She lives with Noge. He is arrested on a charge of spying and dies in prison. Yukie goes to his village. His family is counted a traitor's family and nobody will touch their field. Yukie starts working it. Akira Kurosawa directs. Setsuko Hara plays Yukie; Susumu Fujita, Denjirō Ōkōchi and Haruko Sugimura are in the cast. It is a Japanese production, made in 1946. Its ground is real events; the removal of a university teacher in the thirties and a spying case are its starting point. The film was made immediately after the war, under the occupation; the screenplay went through the censorship of that period and was altered. The matter it treats is choice; Yukie decides several times between a comfortable life and a hard one. Setsuko Hara is outside her usual calm parts here; the character is angry and stubborn. The section in the field is its strongest; the villagers' pressure and the work in the mud are held long. Kurosawa put a woman at the centre here, something he did rarely. The ending gives no victory; what is won is only standing upright. Its limit is structure; the narrative is in pieces, the two halves are like different films, and the pace uneven. Who it is for: viewers who like early Kurosawa and postwar Japanese cinema. Who it is not for: it is episodic, heavy, and the ending bitter.