Street of Love and Hope

A Japanese film set in Tokyo. Masao is at middle school. His family is poor; his mother is ill and he has a small sister. He has a trade. He sells pigeons in the street. The pigeons have a property. A bird that is sold and taken away comes home. Masao sells it again. One day a girl buys one. Kyoko is from a rich family. The bird comes back. She notices. But she does not report it. She takes an interest in Masao and wants to help him. She arranges a job at her brother's company. From there the film is a story about class. Masao goes to the interview. He is not taken. The reason is his school, his neighbourhood and his family's situation. Kyoko is upset. His teacher is upset. But neither of them fully understands why it happened. What the narrative is interested in is not poverty but good intentions: its idea is that the rich girl genuinely wants to help and that it does no good at all; the distance between the two sides does not close with a feeling. Masao continues the fraud. The narrative does not present it as a moral matter. Kyoko's brother learns about it. The last section takes place on a roof. A gun, a pigeon and a decision. The ending is entirely hard and the narrative gives no consolation. This is Nagisa Ōshima's first film. He was twenty-seven and working as an assistant at a studio. The studio was not happy with the result. The title was changed and distribution kept limited; the tension between Ōshima and the company started here. The images are black and white and plain. Fumio Watanabe, Yuki Tominaga and Kakuko Chino are in the cast. Who it is for: anyone curious about the beginning of the Japanese new wave and films about class. Who it is not for: anyone looking for hope; despite the title there is none in the narrative, and that is deliberate.