Crazed Fruit is a Japanese film about young people living in Japan at the time the picture was made: the mid-1950s.
Predictably, the kids here distrust their elders and are cynical about their country. Rather than being instruments of the change they think there ought to be, however, they merely do what is ordinary in every young person’s life: they fall in love. That is to say, Haruji (Masahiko Tsugawa) falls for perfidious 20-year-old Eri (Mie Kitahara), who is all but stolen from him by Haruji’s older brother Natsuhisa (Yujiro Ishihara), and it all goes very badly. The fruit of all this love is crazed; hence the film’s title.
Vigorous and disturbing, CF was directed, not always conventionally, by Ko Nakahira and written by Shintaro Ishihara. The direction produces a film which is just as much a work of art as Rashomon or Tokyo Story. Its images are as steely as a bayonet.
(In Japanese with English subtitles)
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