Rapid Response: The Warped Ones and The Japanese New Wave

How is it that every so often I can still stumble across a film I’ve never heard of, a director with a massive catalog that has escaped me and even an entire genre of film history that I was completely unaware of?

This week, that genre was the Japanese New Wave, and the film was Koreyoshi Kurahara’s “The Warped Ones” from 1960, a bizarre teenage drama about a pair of young men who are released from prison and proceed to wreck havoc in whatever way suits their fancy. They spot the man who sent them to jail walking down a boardwalk with his girlfriend, and the two kidnap the woman and rape her on the beach. After the ordeal, she tracks down our young anti-hero and confides in him that her relationship has forever been damaged until he too suffers a mental breakdown.

“The Warped Ones” is a film about identity and the animalistic impulses that we’re driven to when faced with reality, but at its core it’s an avant-garde art film about youth and rebelling against culture in the same way that the French New Wave films of Jean-Luc Godard and Francois Truffaut are. The Japanese New Wave borrowed the title from the French, and the common criticism has been that they also borrowed the style and original ideas from France as well.

But what other critics have observed more fully is that the genre developed and emerged simultaneously with the French, and although the Japanese lacked the auteur theory to go along with the film movement, these films were drastically different from the Western influenced Kurosawa films and the more stately works by Ozu and Mizoguchi.

Today “The Warped Ones” could be read as a B-movie, but it’s too stylish and plain interesting to give it such a reductive label. The cinematography in “The Warped Ones” is like Godard on speed. It’s jump cut free, but the camera achieves angles that are simply dizzying, and the action shot freeze frames during the opening and closing credits seem to take Truffaut’s technique in “The 400 Blows” to a new level.

Whereas Jean-Paul Belmondo channeled coolness in “Breathless,” the kids in “The Warped Ones” stand out like a sore thumb begging to be cast in a European film. Boldly flaunting open shirts and twisting his body in a way even James Dean couldn’t do, Tamio Kawaji’s Akira achieves a new level of masculinity that looks plain funny in a bourgeois Japanese society.

The score is constantly pulsating with a hip, driving jazz score by Toshiro Mayuzumi, and it wonderfully entrances Akira in this hypnotic dream world that moves his rebellious side. When he’s outside that fantasy, we see some shocking depth that makes him more than just violent, and the whole film is truly surreal in its frenetic violence and vulgarity.

The question becomes, “If I want to watch some Japanese New Wave films but critics don’t much care for it and it’s been forgotten in film history to the point that Netflix doesn’t even have it, where do I start?” Well, The Criterion Collection has a big box set of Japanese New Wave films, including “The Warped Ones,” and the art house streaming site mubi.com also has two lists of roughly 90 films to choose from. I quite enjoyed “The Warped Ones,” but from what I’ve been reading, I gather the best place to start is with the director Nagisa Oshima, the father of the film movement, which is precisely what I may be doing later this week.