Review for Yasuzo Masumura's Debut, 'Kisses' (1957) from Yume Pictures R2 UK DVD.

Another appearance of a Masumura film on DVD, this time in the form of his debut feature, 'Kisses', via Yume Pictures in the U.K.

This time around, it's a teen romance showing an initial blend and balance towards a slightly less individual film from this great director, but one that shows the skill with compromise which allows such films to both attain a regular audience and treat them to something new. Here's hidden beneath the obvious, remains much more to be disscovered about a man who's work is far more layered than sometimes initially appears to be the case, and it's akin to the social dramas of certain key directors that still maintain a much more solid and longstanding reputation to this day. This film, and it's initial reaction, clearly shows signs of setting his reputation into place, and many great films that were to follow, for this alone it's worth delving into.

Japanese Cinema seems full, it seems to me, of truncated narratives. Stories are often shown in a way that suggests unscripted being introduced and portrayed in the action of the film, not through improvisation of dialogue but in how physical actions are used to connect scenes into sequences. Artistic nuances also arrive from the confident pace at which relatively cheaply made films are produced, with sections being stripped, skipped and edited out by pairing things down, selecting the necessary from the unnecessary. Prolific filmmakers, at least on many occasions in the past (if not so often these days) can produce a hit, and from this opportunities seem to swarm in, and the identity of those involved, not just the director, gradually grows beyond all expectations.

Looking backwards, at least looking from how prolific Masumura became after this initial film and from having viewed a certain amount of his other work before this film, 'Kisses' from 1957, the angles on which we can place value on this film is perhaps two fold. Firstly, a much more individual identity can be seen in later works, but you can identify a certain amount of the roots of all that here, even if you can't quite yet see the freedom to produce less familiar or groundbreaking ideas. Secondly, because this films is in parts incredibly familiar, it can be hard to see the value of it all in objective terms.

Here's a story that shows a burgeoning romance that interestingly seems to be heading for a crash and burn scenario, at least from the sheer brevity with which the initial 30 minutes speeds by. Two young characters, Kinichi (the hot-headed teenage lad) and Akiko (the romance-obsessed young lady) play fairly sterotypical roles of any teen romance film which are tempered with Masumura's own slice of realtively atypical situations that each find themselves in, and how these lifestyles subsequently interact with side stories of their family life, their additional troubles. Masumura does manage to do something rarely seen with brief narratives, with the concept of a life rapidly changing over a short duration of a film, in that he tells it in a convincingly natural manner, with a great sense of plausibility rather than of following the solutions to an obvious situation by taking too much from others previous attempts at such tales. The spontaneous and trusting, naive or ignorant nature of the characters at the centre allow us to experience a grounded-but-dramatic natural process that likely happens a million times a day somewhere in the word, but only happens to each and every one of us on very few (if any) occasions in our lifetime. It's at once entirely recognizable and also fresh, at once familiar from life and from film in differing forms, but temptingly seductive as something we know to be special and rarely given to us in a way that's not quite so blatantly manipulative as can so often be the case. It's more impressive for how it's not going too far beyond the idea of setting two people into one anothers minds in terms of a romance initiating itself, but how it also manages to go far beyond being nothing but a simple romantic tale, in that it offers Masumura's own individual take on society, hidden within and beneath the opening top layers.

Once the first half of the film is in place, Masumura's own take on how to use the romance between two youngsters switches to that of how to portray people caught between independant adult life and a life still heavily connected to the role of being someone's child. The parents - both Kinichi and Akiko's fathers are in jail, Akiko's mother is in hospital and seemingly close to death - require their assistance, the two of them struggle with their working lives to provide enough money to manage various high costs being imposed by their families troubles, and both find themselves edging towards jumping into dealing with the situations together and independantly. It's here where Masumura begins to show a talent for a very fresh form of creating a social commentary with both familiar elements and fresh perspective. There's not quite enough of it though, and Masumura isn't so much struggling and showing promise, so this film remains impressive but not fully formed as something from a figure we've grown to know from more formed work. Having said that, as another rare example of his work, it's another important part of the jigsaw, and I want more, but more of the stuff that's somewhere down the line and showing where he got to rather than where he came from.