Rokudenashi

Hizuru Takachiho is the secretary of a boss who is ruthless in business but genial otherwise. On her way back from the bank with the regular payroll, she's waylaid by her boss' son and his four college buddies, forced into a car, and the money is taken from her. It's all a practical joke, but she gets angry. When she goes home, she has to listen to her brother and his wife bicker about money.

Eventually she decides that one of the four students is worth saving. This leads her down a path of teenage angst, apathy, and gangsters-are-cool culture that infects her viewpoint.

It's Yoshishige Yoshida's first film as a director. He also wrote the screenplay, his first. Like other leaders of the Japanese New Wave, he told stories of nihilistic young men. In this one, the story glories in that attitude, leaving me with the sensation that if they don't care about their future, there's no reason I should. Japanese cinema has long had a habit of telling stories of failure, making explicit the Japanese saying that "the nail that sticks up gets hammered down." However, pending on a nail that is already bent flat seems to me a boring exercise.

Yoshida's later works became more conventional, to the point where he wrote and directed a version of WUTHERING HEIGHTS.