Synopsis
Cruel Story of Youth (1960) is a Japanese New Wave film you can watch online on iFILM, directed by Nagisa Oshima at twenty-five. Schoolgirl Makoto meets Kiyoshi — a university student who rescues her from a threatening stranger, then promptly turns predatory himself.
They develop a scheme: Makoto hitchhikes, middle-aged men stop to pick her up, Kiyoshi arrives to shake them down for money. It runs smoothly until it doesn't. A pregnancy, a spell inside, and the grinding reality of the street tear through whatever illusions they were still carrying.
Oshima made the film as a deliberate break from Japanese studio melodrama — he had no interest in postwar youth as victims or heroes, only as people with nowhere particular to land. The second feature in his early trilogy, it remains one of the sharpest records of what 1960 Japan actually looked like from the outside looking in. Stream Cruel Story of Youth on iFILM.
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