Nagisa Oshima’s debut feature film, A Town of Love and Hope, also known as Street of Love and Hope (Ai to kibo no machi) – a title apparently forced upon the movie by the studio, which freaked after seeing it the first time – is set in a Tokyo with not much of either. Certainly not the latter (hope), and the former (love) is tinged with an uneasy calculatedness. It’s this hint of duplicity which makes A Town of Love and Hope a little different, I think, from the standard neorealist drama, because there’s a palpable tension lingering in the words and motivations of the characters.
The film revolves around a boy who sold his pigeon (the original title Oshima preferred) – namely, Masao (Hiroshi Fujikawa), who we see sitting with two elderly shoeshine ladies in the Ginza district. The pigeons are sold to Kyoko (Yuko Tominaga), a high school sophomore of wealthy means who takes pity on Masao. But it’s all a fairly harmless scam that Masao has been running begrudgingly for quite some time with the encouragement of his mother: the homing pigeons, of course, end up flying back to the slum where Masao, his mother, and his mute younger sister live, practically in the shadow of the factories’ smokestacks. Once they return, he sells them all over again to the next dupe.
Intrigued by Masao, Kyoko keeps returning to his spot and, later, to his house. The attraction is romantic, certainly, but she is also moved by the fact that he had to sell his own pet pigeons to afford food. She tells her brother, by way of explanation, that she wants to be “a woman of justice”.
Kyoko isn’t the only person who has taken an interest in Masao’s welfare; this includes his English teacher Miss Akiyama, herself of similar humble background. She wants him to go to high school, but knows his family can’t afford it. She then tries to get him a job – with Kyoko’s help – in a television factory, whose personnel manager is Kyoko’s father. “They never employ our graduates,” Miss Akiyama tells Kyoko, and she finds out later, in a meeting with Yuji, Kyoko’s brother, that “city boys” aren’t hired by that factory as a matter of policy because “they’re too sophisticated” (and presumably, not docile enough).
“It’s rare to see a person interested in social problems,” Yuji says right before asking, “May I see you sometime?” A romance ensues, like the improbable one between Masao and Kyoko. (There’s a great scene when Kyoko swoops into the slum with the oblivious air of the privileged, her arms laden with gifts, and promptly makes herself comfortable in Masao’s home.) “Your family is happier than I thought,” she says after her visit to their cramped hovel of a home. “I thought poor people were sad,” she says apologetically.
There’s actually little consideration overall of what Masao actually wants. Indeed, Masao remains more or less passive, and it’s this interplay between Masao and people who seem to know what’s better for him that provides a quiet tension throughout the movie. Oshima isn’t just interested in the cultural and economic gap between rich and poor, even as the screenplay sets up parallel (romantic) relationships crossing that divide; he also raises questions, in an understated fashion, about why that divide is being crossed, about the fascination these wealthy people have with this particular poor family.
Kyoko’s relationship with Masao, for instance, isn’t exactly questioned by Yuji or her father, though it’s dismissed (perhaps correctly) as idealistic folly. That is, the city slum (and her relationship with Masao) doesn’t seem to be seen as a site of danger; they certainly didn’t object to her visiting “the poor part of town”. (Yuji says he’s had experience working in poor communities before.) What they believe may be even worse: they understand the slum-dwellers as people, doomed by circumstance, who can’t be helped.
The pigeons are perhaps a little obvious as a metaphor – they serve as the literal intermediaries between the different classes. The cynicism of the film is seen in its fairly explicit argument: in the same way the homing instinct is natural to the pigeons, so too are the characters’ behaviors, dictated and circumscribed by their respective social statuses. When we get to the ending – though its blunt emotional brutality was unexpected – it comes bearing the weight of crushing inevitability.
Yuji tells Kyoko, “I don’t want you exposed to sorrow and misery, that’s all.” The film’s opening credits are superimposed over a camera pan across the industrial landscape, which we realize a third of the way into the movie is actually the (bird’s eye) view from Kyoko’s house high up in the hills. The sorrow and misery is never far after all.
[NOTE: I was originally planning to write a blog entry about Oshima’s fascinating and demented Three Resurrected Drunkards (1968), which showed last night at the Pacific Film Archive as part of an Oshima retrospective. But then I realized I neither had the historical context to understand more deeply the status of Korean immigrants in Japan, or Korea and Japan’s role during the Vietnam War, or the lingering effects of the U.S. occupation. (The highlight for me was a sequence where the three stooges ask people on the street if they’re Korean or Japanese.) There’s even a structural gag, pushed just a little beyond audience-discomfiting levels, which (I paraphrase James Quandt in his introduction here) has had projectionists scrambling. Therefore my equally uninformed blog entry above. I’ll just leave you folks with the theme song; may it haunt your dreams as it has mine.]
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