When the president of Shochiku studios saw A Street of Love and Hope, he suspended director Nagisa Ôshima for six months. In his first feature Ôshima turned what was expected to be a charming family melodrama into a bleak portrait of class oppression. Shiro Kido, the head of Shochiku, accurately stated that “This film is saying that the rich and poor can never join hands!” (quoted in Joan Mellen’s BFI Film Classics monograph for Ôshima’s 1976 film In the Realm of the Senses). It tells the tale of a tentative friendship between a poor boy and a rich girl, who meet when he sells her a pigeon on the street. What she doesn’t know is that the pigeon is trained to fly back to the boy’s home, whereupon he will sell the clever bird to another unsuspecting buyer. Instead of having the young duo overcome their differences and forgive their missteps, Ôshima sharpens them, until they’d rather trade blows than join hands.
Ôshima wanted to dryly title the film “The Boy Who Sold His Pigeon,” but Shochiku insisted on the misleadingly uplifting A Street of Love and Hope. There is very little of either – it would be more accurate to call it a street of exhaustion and disappointment. The story revolves around Masao (Hiroshi Fujikawa), a schoolboy who lives in a rundown shack with his ailing mother and learning-disabled sister. Until his mother Kuniko (Yûko Mochizuki) can get up on her feet and get back to her shoeshining job, Masao takes her place on the street to “sell” his pigeons. Bright-eyed classmate Kyôko (Yuki Tominaga) sees Masao there and buys the bird out of pity. She takes on Masao as a project, urging her father to hire him at his television manufacturing factory. But they run a background check and discover his pigeon-selling scam, scuttling Masao’s chance at a job. Kyôko feels betrayed and ends the film on a note of vengeful cruelty.
In the book “Currents in Japanese Cinema” (Kodansha International, 1982) film critic Tadao Sato reported that, in the original script, “another scene followed in which the teenagers agree not to let their friendship end on such a sour note, and there was the brave, heartwarming message that together they would build a more genuine society.” That is nowhere to be found in Ôshima’s film, which puts Kyôko and her family at a remove. We can see forest vistas from their glass-enclosed family room, her dad shot from low angles on the second floor of his mansion, while Masao’s family scrambles around in a hovel, their mother shot always crouched at ground level, their only view made up of the industrial waste being spewed out by the local factory.
Masao’s con artist deceptions and the desperate state of his family are elements that will emerge in a future Ôshima project, Boy (1969), in which a family pretends to get hit by cars in order to shake down the drivers. Like Masao’s family, they are stuck in poverty and are desperate to do anything to claw their way out, but the only way they know how to make money turns them into societal outcasts. Masao’s lies are more innocent, but they are still enough to eject him from the embrace of Kyôko’s family and destroy any shot he had at a middleclass life.
Masao’s teacher, Miss Akiyama, is in a similar spot. She is barely making ends meet but starts dating Kyôko’s rich brother Yuji (Fumio Watanabe), who was one of the decisionmakers who rejected Masao’s job application. She soon realizes that their relationship is an unbridgeable gap. In a starkly lit nightclub, with latticed lampshades dimming the light around their faces, she informs him of their split. She understands Masao’s motivations and explains that due to her financial circumstances she herself might have to do “something socially unacceptable but necessary to survive.” And that his family chose not to forgive such an act, or even comprehend it. She explains, “There’s a huge gulf between the two of us. Do you think you can bridge the gap?” After an exchange of close-ups and Akiyama’s beseeching, “Well?”, he unclasps his hands from hers and proves her point.
In the next scene an enraged Kyôko urges Yuji to grab a gun and exact revenge on Masao for his lies. It is an unremittingly bleak and bitter exchange, a pair of bruised egos lashing out to inflict senseless damage. As Shiro Kido bemoaned, rich and poor will never join hands in A Street of Love and Hope, only throw them.
