"Boy" is a really interesting movie for a number of reasons but chiefly for the astonishing resilience of its main character, a boy of ten, forced to live a nomadic existence with a scoundrel of a father and a negligent, self-absorbed stepmother.
The parents regularly endanger the boy, letting him throw himself into the sides of passing cars so they can extort money from the "guilty" drivers. Always on the run, the family lives in hotels or inns. When there's money, the father indulges himself in easy living; when money's short or things don't go his way, he slugs his common-law wife or slaps the boy around. He tells the boy his grandparents have no use for him.
The boy lives the life of an invisible kid--no home, no school, no friends, no belongings. It even seems that he has no name--his parents call him "kiddo." There are two constants in his life--his fantasies about salvation by aliens from the Andromeda galaxy, and the company of his little step-brother, whom he regales with talk about the aliens.
There's no sentimentality in this movie. With the powerful exception of the very last scene, the boy looks out for himself and appears quite tough. At one point he runs away, taking a train to some place by the sea. But we get only a glimpse of this place. In the next scene he is back with his parents--because, one has to assume, there really isn't any place for him to go. More than once in this film, the family is on the verge of breaking up, but instead they continue with their nomadic existence and their scams.
So much for traditional Japanese values. The characters in this movie live in a floating world where the old verities don't apply. There are allusions to nationalism and military valor, but these are like vestiges from the dim past.
One of the side benefits of this movie is that we get to see many views of the Japan of the time. One of the irritants of the movie--at least the version that I saw--is the subtitles, whose white letters are barely legible in the scenes set in snowy Hokkaido.
This movie gave me another reason to be grateful for Turner Classic Movies.
The parents regularly endanger the boy, letting him throw himself into the sides of passing cars so they can extort money from the "guilty" drivers. Always on the run, the family lives in hotels or inns. When there's money, the father indulges himself in easy living; when money's short or things don't go his way, he slugs his common-law wife or slaps the boy around. He tells the boy his grandparents have no use for him.
The boy lives the life of an invisible kid--no home, no school, no friends, no belongings. It even seems that he has no name--his parents call him "kiddo." There are two constants in his life--his fantasies about salvation by aliens from the Andromeda galaxy, and the company of his little step-brother, whom he regales with talk about the aliens.
There's no sentimentality in this movie. With the powerful exception of the very last scene, the boy looks out for himself and appears quite tough. At one point he runs away, taking a train to some place by the sea. But we get only a glimpse of this place. In the next scene he is back with his parents--because, one has to assume, there really isn't any place for him to go. More than once in this film, the family is on the verge of breaking up, but instead they continue with their nomadic existence and their scams.
So much for traditional Japanese values. The characters in this movie live in a floating world where the old verities don't apply. There are allusions to nationalism and military valor, but these are like vestiges from the dim past.
One of the side benefits of this movie is that we get to see many views of the Japan of the time. One of the irritants of the movie--at least the version that I saw--is the subtitles, whose white letters are barely legible in the scenes set in snowy Hokkaido.
This movie gave me another reason to be grateful for Turner Classic Movies.