Kurosawa's No Regrets for Our Youth (1946)

I haven't seen any of Kurosawa's films made during WWII but No Regrets for Our Youth, made just after the war, is an interesting film.  We know Kurosawa in this country for The Seven Samurai (1954) and that one-time favorite of college students Rashomon (1950) -- truth is subjective! -- and in one's rush to discard him after one has learned about the sublime and subtle films of Mizoguchi and Ozu it should not be forgotten that he did make a variety of other films. 

No Regrets for Our Youth stars Setsuko Hara, who made 67 movies before her seven films with Ozu (I wrote about Tokyo Story in November of last year) in the fifties and sixties and then retired in 1963 at the age of 43; she died last year at the age of 95.  She is as lovely in the Kurosawa film as in the better-known Ozu films but has a very different kind of role.  Her character joins the university protests against the invasion of Manchuria in 1932 and her father, a professor, is fired.  Although she is in love with another protester she wants to be independent and moves from the country to Tokyo to get a job.  After three years in Tokyo she finds out that her lover is there and after much hesitation goes to see him and immediately moves in with him.  She knows he is involved in some shady dealings but Kurosawa never reveals what they are (though the basis for the character was a Soviet spy), as Hara's lover is arrested and dies in jail under suspicious circumstance.  She goes to visit her lover's parents in the country, where they are scorned because of their son, and gradually wins then over, staying to help them with their rice crop.

At the beginning of the film nature is idyllic and to be enjoyed, but after the war it is harsh and needs to be tamed, even the wind in the trees sounds vaguely sinister.  Setsuko Hara plays a struggling and hesitant character, unsure of her place until she finds it, at least temporarily, in the rice fields. The replanting of the rice fields that neighbors have destroyed because of the son's crimes becomes a metaphor for the rebuilding, physically and emotionally, of Japan after the war.