Movies: Young Thugs: Nostalgia

Miss Ito, the kid’s drop-dead-gorgeous sixth-grade teacher, decides to take an interest in him when she sees him hung over and throwing up at his desk. When she comes by to speak with his parents, she runs into Grandpa, who is so lovestruck that his cigarette drops right out of his mouth. Then Dad shows up and hits on her, sparking a domestic dispute that ends with the old man shoving a broom handle into the other man’s rear end. The black-humored tone of the scene gets all the blacker when you realize that nobody really reacts all that strongly when Mom gets thrown around — but boy, do they ever go ballistic when the pretty young teacher takes a blow!

Things really fall apart when Dad gets roaring drunk and brings home his stripper girlfriend (the film’s opening shots showed that Mom knows about the relationship). Mom grabs her bags and splits, and soon the kid’s also drifting away from home, into the makeshift company of his local circle of equally truant friends. They pass the time sitting by a stagnant river, playing bored games, and doing whatever they can to feel important. Eventually, they find a sense of purpose in pooling their talents (mostly stealing and vandalism, hilariously enough) into an art competition. First prize is a set of paints, which they’re hoping to use to bring happiness to the grandmother of one of their own crowd, a senile old woman who spends all her time picking through the mud on the banks of the nearby river.

Then the movie’s real themes begin to emerge — the notion of how the child is father to the man, and how a boy can become a man in the first place. The kid’s own dad is scarcely more than a punk himself — ambling along with his shirttail hanging out, hands in his pockets, hiding his eyes behind sunglasses. And it’s not as if he doesn’t have a lack of a father to blame for it, since there’s scarcely a scene where he and his own father aren’t together. Dad’s not without heart, though, just without priorities. In one of the most lovely and touching scenes in the movie, he gives his girlfriend a baby turtle, and the way the scene unfolds as a series of surprises makes it doubly affectionate. But he’s got no real connection to his wife or son, and will only find that after a good deal of pain. The boy’s got little faith in his parents or his peers. “No point in reasoning with idiots,” he asserts, but Miss Ito doesn’t believe that: “If you give up, nothing can be changed.”

Miike is fond of taking what would otherwise be fairly conventional stories and putting them through the filter of his own wild imagination. He gives Nostalgia a goofy, unforced energy, and tricks it out with simple but effective visual extravagances that remind us how this is all being remembered, not how it actually happened. This includes a hilarious fantasy sequence where the brother of one of the kid’s friends is masturbating gleefully to his cache of (censored) porno mags. I also liked the little details that make the whole thing feel that much more convincing as a reminiscence. Consider the guy on the street trying to sell his telescopes with the ad pitch that right now, everyone in America is using them to see Neil Armstrong on the moon. (The moon shot itself forms the backdrop to many of Nostalgia’s events, and makes the film feel all the most wistful instead of simply dated.)

The last twenty minutes or so of the movie are a bit aimless, but no less charming. One year ends and another begins, and we see the kid taking his first tentative steps out of childhood into adolescence. He still has the neighborhood thugs to deal with, and his dad’s still as shiftless as ever, but hey, at least he’s growing up. I was reminded not only of Fellini’s endings-that-don’t-really-end, but the life-goes-on feeling of Truffaut’s Small Change, another great movie about the awkwardness of growing up. The difference is that in Miike’s movies the kids know what the dirty jokes mean and can’t wait to spring them on the hapless adults around them.