The Young Rebels (Keisuke Kinoshita, 1980)

Tomisaburo Wakayama in The Young Rebels 

Journalist: Go Kato
Asakawa Senjo: Tomisaburo Wakayama
Takiko: Junko Mihara
Yukio: Tatsuya Okamoto
Orie: Tomoko Saito

Director: Keisuke Kinoshita
Screenplay: Keisuke Kinoshita
Cinematography: Masao Kosugi

The title of Keisuke Kinoshita's polemical pseudo-documentary, The Young Rebels, sounds like that of a Hollywood film from the 1950s, the era of naive, sensational, and didactic dramas about "juvenile delinquency." Which is exactly what The Young Rebels turns out to be: an exploitation film about why kids go wrong. The answer is a simple one: their parents. The kids, Kinoshita is saying, are not all right: They ride around on motorcycles, they cut school, they shoplift, and they have sex. This was not exactly news in 1980: Nagisa Oshima, for example, was onto these facts in 1960, when he made Cruel Story of Youth, and he blamed it on dysfunctional parenting in 1969's Boy. But Oshima's films are about people more than they are about problems. Kinoshita has lost sight of the people in his obsession with the problem, and the result is a scattershot film designed to ferret out examples of parental irresponsibility both high -- affluent parents who are so obsessed with climbing the corporate or social ladders that they either ignore their children or spoil them -- and low -- parents who are so mired in poverty and its attendant ills like alcoholism and crime that they abuse their children. The narrative framework of the film is as simplistic as its point of view: a journalist goes in search of answers and interviews children and parents. Kinoshita is enough of an artist that he knows how to tell the several stories uncovered by the journalist, which gives The Young Rebels enough dramatic substance to keep the polemic at bay during the storytelling, but the piling on of miseries turns into overkill. Eventually, the journalist visits a kind of reform school in Hokkaido, the north of Japan, where wayward boys are nurtured back into society -- but there's even some recidivism there. At the end, the point seems to be that every kid needs a loving mother and father -- the Japanese title translates as a cry for help: "Father! Mother!" It has been pointed out that people raised children for millennia until, sometime in the mid-20th century, they became self-conscious about it and turned it into a problem. Kinoshita's humorless and even hopeless polemic does little to solve the problem, especially when the film often seems bogged down in fogeyism: A scene of joyriding motorcycle gangs, for example, is treated as a vision from hell.