Spring's Awakening

[Dan Sallitt]

An earlier thread on this film is now closed:

http://groups.google.com/group/naruseretro/browse_thread/thread/476c6dbd9b6cc311

Now that it is subtitled (46 ½ years ahead of the timetable we
envisioned in the linked thread), SPRING’S AWAKENING is a definitive
refutation of the general assumption that Naruse had a long creative
dry spell between 1935 and 1951. Other major works from this period
have been uncovered – but many of the mid-period successes adopted
odd, absurdist forms to get around censorship and unfavorable industry
trends. Whereas SPRING’S AWAKENING drives right down the main
thoroughfare of Naruse’s stylistic world.

In concept, the film is a bit narrow: nearly every moment spins a
variation on the theme of adolescence struggling with new sexual
feelings and devoid of guidance from the uptight adult world. The
protagonist, a cheerful girl named Kumiko (Yoshiko Kuga, of OLDER
BROTHER, YOUNGER SISTER), is part of a cohort of three boys and three
girls, all sincere, naïve, and passionate about ideas, and all
behaving erratically under the influence of hormones. Kumiko’s hard
luck is that her parents are more old-fashioned and nervous about sex
than those of her friends, so that a kiss stolen by a classmate leaves
her in terror of becoming pregnant. The more enlightened father
(Takashi Shimizu) of one of Kumiko’s friends summarizes the film's
theme with a speech near the end, exhorting parents to respect and
understand the budding sexuality of their children.

If the theme is perhaps too pervasive, it also gives Naruse and co-
writer Toshio Yasumi carte blanche to focus on small-scale, mysterious
behavior. The film had me at its first scene: Kumiko returns home
from school, makes eye contact with a cat, and spots the family maid
talking to a boy. The nervous maid tries to dodge Kumiko’s question
about the illicit contact, but the girl happily jumps to a new topic:
“That cat was here again!” Sex is knocking at the door but hasn’t yet
taken possession of the premises. The girls of Kumiko’s group fret
over the indignity of enduring a mass physical exam at school, but
smile as they proclaim the exam disgusting. A boy asks another, “I
look in just one place when I see a nude. What about you?” then
shoves his friend when he doesn’t get a response, though the violence
fades into joshing horseplay. Discussing poetry, an intellectual girl
says, “You know, if you decide a poem is about someone else, even in a
very general way, it gets a lot more interesting!” Alone with one of
the girls, faced with a pregnant pause in the conversation, a boy
flops on his back instead of making a move, then pops up again a few
moments later, not out of the game yet.

From the precise opening montage that picks Kumiko out of a flow of
city activity, Naruse keeps a controlled, detached perspective on the
teenagers’ diffuse crises. As is his wont, he saves extreme closeups
for his climax, and generally arranges the kids in static long shot
tableaux that give the boys’ sudden spasms of motion a faintly
threatening quality. The film kicks up to a new level of expression
for the scene of Kumiko’s first kiss, set in a hilly landscape where
one of the boys goes to paint, and made unpredictable by the
characters' intense mood swings. Naruse slows the film’s rhythm here
and stages its action across a vast space, less to create suspense
than to add a timeless, Fordian aura to the array of confusing
impressions jostling for space in the kids’ minds.

Like Deanie in SPLENDOR IN THE GRASS, Kumiko finally breaks down in
hysterical laughter under the strain of mediating between libido and
societal pressure. But Naruse and Yasumi are not prepared to take
their protagonist’s ordeal as far as Kazan and Inge were 14 years
later. SPRING’S AWAKENING’s didactic mission seems to give Naruse
fewer emotional dimensions to bring together at the climax, and
probably drops it below the top rank of the director’s work. But its
sustained formal and behavioral brilliance beg for critical attention.