This felt like a depiction of school as purgatory, and as such, is one of the grimmest portrayals of high school I've seen in recent memory.

Even without the violence, the way the camera never leaves the school grounds (there might have been one scene early on where it did, but even then, it's still on campus over 95% of the time) and the way almost none of the adults seem to care about the students (with the exception of the one teacher who looks after the garden) creates this sensation that the school is a prison, or somewhere that feels impossible to escape from.

It's quite suffocating and intense, and then when you factor in the scenes of violence, it becomes nightmarish. Much of the violence happens partly or fully off screen, which I think was a good move. It still packs an impact, and ensures that the violence is never accidentally made "cool" or impressive.

If you're okay with something downbeat and intense, I could give this a pretty easy recommendation. It's not flawless, and you could criticise the fairly loose story (it ends with a great climax, but I'm not sure if the movie as a whole built to it completely successfully, for example).

But it's well made, decently acted, and packs a punch. It's also currently on YouTube in decent quality and with English subtitles.

I was pretty excited about BLUE SPRING based on a few reviews that I'd read comparing it to BATTLE ROYALE and LORD OF THE FLIES - well, this film is neither. BLUE SPRING was to me, a confusing and relatively pointless film, other than showing a bunch of angst-ridden Japanese teenagers in a weird school where they pretty much run the show.

A gang leader is chosen amongst the students by participating in a potentially dangerous game called "clapping" - and Kujo is crowned the new leader of the senior class. His best pal Aoki is a slow-witted fellow who eventually gets tired of constantly playing second-fiddle to Kujo, and the two come to blows over it. There's a bunch of other random and pretty meaningless stuff that happens in between all this that never really amounts to anything...

From what I had read about BLUE SPRING before seeing it, I was hoping for either a violent social-statement ala BATTLE ROYALE, or perhaps an engaging tale of "lost youth". Unfortunately, it didn't deliver on either end. Stylistically, the film was good, but I was never engaged by the characters and couldn't care less about what happened to any of them. A few of the sub-plots were interesting, but were never expanded on enough to take anything meaningful from them. Overall, I found that the "parts" of BLUE SPRING never converged to form any sort of worthwhile "whole". Other reviewers seemed to have found something in this film that I didn't - personally I thought it was average at best, and would only recommend it to Japanese cinephile completists...5/10

Toshiaki Toyoda's "Blue Spring" (Aoi Haru, 2001) is a film that seems to fit into several Japanese cinematic and pop culture staples. Based on a "yankii" (juvenile delinquent) manga of the same name, this fits into a long-line of Japanese manga, anime and cinema which feature teenage boys, decked out in their black uniforms, hitting each other in increasingly inventive forms of violence. Referencing the seasons in the title to reflect the characters' life stage has also been known to be used.

Asahi High is a school where the boys rule and teachers are little more than babysitters the students pick and choose whether to listen to or not. On the roof, the school's gangs meet to hang off the rails and play a round of "clapping", where the winner is the one who can let go of the railing and clap the most times before grabbing back hold once more. The victor gets to rule the school.

Kujo (Ryuhei Matsuda) is the latest winner and initially takes to his new role, dishing out violence to those that come across him. His gang, however, are a bit more fractured in a school world of every man for himself. The teachers make little real effort to get through to the kids, beyond Hanada (Mame Yamada),and sooner or later, the boys start to realise that they can't rely on each other, and/or simply feel alienated.

The manga was a collection of short stories, and as such, Toyoda's incarnation doesn't have much overarching plot of which to speak. The "gang" are quite independent of each other and have their own stories, with random characters thrown-in here and there.

"Blue Spring" reflects the era from which it came. The manga published in 1993, what followed were a number of films in the mid-late Nineties looking at disaffected youth in the midst of economic downturn. As such, we see a familiar tale of children seeing little future after school, similar to Takeshi Kitano's 1995 "Kids Return": A baseball player who failed to make the national finals runs away to join the yakuza; a punk told he is failing and will have to repeat a year when just wanting to graduate, stabs his friend with a stoic expression.

Asahi High is a school of fantasy. With graffiti-laden walls and toilets of spray paint, blood and filth, the teachers let the kids rule, walking in and out of class at will, eating and throwing allsorts at the blackboards. Toyoda's flare for slow motion shots is also prevalent; the gang moving en masse to guitar music. While somewhat indulgent, he achieves the desired cool: the cast maintaining a balance of tough guy with youthful naivety.

We barely see the world outside of the school's walls: the gang seeing little future beyond them. Outside, there are only concrete blocks, power lines and waiting yakuza recruiters. While this achieves some nice lines for Norimichi Kasamatsu's cinematography, it doesn't paint a pretty picture for the boys.

Kujo asks the rest of the gang individually what they want to do with their lives. They don't really have answers. Nor really does he. While achieving his position of power, he glides through the halls and overlooks the school grounds from his victory spot. He could be a star footballer, but lacks dedication to it and gradually starts to reject his new-found position. He has no explicit ambitions, choosing to go with the flow. Best friend Aoki (Hirofumi Arai) can't cope with Kujo's new behaviour. With Kujo as leader and his best friend, he had power. If Kujo doesn't have the power over others in their small world, neither does he.

Kujo, new yakuza recruit Kimura (Yusuke Oshiba) and newly arrested Yukio (Sosuke Takaoka) all plant flowers under Hanada's observation. The three grow at different rates, marked by cigarettes with their names; Kujo's the one to bloom best. By seemingly rejecting violence, he may move on to summer, but the others may be forever trapped in their eternal spring.

politic1983.home.blog