BOY Movie Review

Shonen

One of the most overtly confrontational of the new generation of Japanese filmmakers, Nagisa Oshima is best known in the U.S. for In the Realm of the Senses, his scandalous, widely banned marathon of copulation, strangulation, and castration that was based on an actual 1936 incident. Also drawn from a real event was this 1969 Oshima film about a nearly impoverished family whose only income came from shoving their 10-year-old son in front of unsuspecting motorists’ cars. The boy would feign injury, and the terrified, guilt-ridden drivers were virtually blackmailed into paying for the child's “medical bills.” Oshima uses this nightmarish scenario to create a portrait of the modern Japanese family in extremis; as terrified and confused as the boy is by this strange set of family values, it is, nevertheless, a system. As the boy questions that system, his grasp of the world around him—what is real and what is not; what other aspects of his life involve performance, ritual, and lying—becomes increasingly uncertain. Though in the end it's a bit too analytical for its own good. Boy is a disturbing look at the nuclear family reaching critical mass.

NEXT STOP … Diary of a Shijuku Thief, Night of the Hunter, The Family Game

1969 97m/C Tetsuo Abe, Tsuyoshi Kinoshita, Akiko Koyama, Fumio Watanabe; D: Nagisa Oshima; W: Nagisa Oshima; C: Seizo Sengen, Yasuhiro Yoshioka; M: Hikaru Hayashi. NYR