Everything Goes Wrong (1960) is a chaotically intense youth-in-revolt film from the prolific Japanese director Seijun Suzuki. It marked the revival of the taiyozoku (sun tribe) genre, a type of nihilistic teen movie produced at the Nikkatsu Studio that had been shamed out of existence in 1956 by censorious parent groups. Shot in widescreen black & white with a hip jazz score by Keitaro Miho and filled with blasts of anti-authoritarian sex and violence, it’s on the same subversive wavelength as Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless of the same year, and it signals the emergence of Japan’s own New Wave.
The story follows the short and violent life of Jirō Sugita (Tamio Kawachi), a ferociously insecure son of a single mom (Tomoko Naraoka) who spends his time hanging out in bars with other degenerate teens, stealing cars and raging against his mom’s boyfriend Nanbara (Shinsuke Ashida). Jirō’s dad died in WWII, and he harbors a bubbling rage at the married Nanbara for turning his mom into his mistress, regardless if he helped pay for his upbringing. Disgusted with his lot in life, Jirō goes on a joyride with the aimless Toshimi (Yoshiko Nezu), who harbors an unquenchable crush on him. Their reckless baby Bonnie and Clyde routine ends in a gruesome spasm of violence that transitions them from rebels without a cause to wanted criminals with a motive.
The “sun tribe” subculture, coined by journalist Oya Soichi, consisted of Hawaiian shirts, sexual promiscuity, jazz music (there is a prominently placed Coleman Hawkins poster in Jirō’s favorite bar) and an ethos represented by Marlon Brando’s response in The Wild One (1953) to a question asking what he was rebelling against: “whaddya got?” The post-War Japanese society as depicted in Everything Goes Wrong is one of total degeneracy, an amoral populace where rape, miscarriage and suicide are met with a shrug of the shoulder.
The “sun tribe” started with the books written by Shinatro Ishihara (now a far-right politician in Japan), such as Season of the Sun (1955) and Crazed Fruit (1956). They depicted a generation of post-WWII loafers spoiled by a booming economy and twisted by absent parents, even if, as Michael Raine writes in the Criterion Collection essay for the Crazed Fruit movie (also 1956), that “Japanese youth were paid one-tenth what their American counterparts were and could only dream of nightclubs, motorboats, and villas by the sea.”
But this image of dissipated youth caught fire with the media, who would run stories about the cops chasing down oversexed youth. There is a journalist character in Everything Goes Wrong on the crime beat who admits that he only prints the most salacious and outrageous material. It’s all about getting eyeballs. Nikkatsu was struggling in the post-War economy and embraced the sun tribe as a way to make a quick buck – and they cranked out five of them in 1956 – Season of the Sun, Backlight, Crazed Fruit, Summer in Eclipse and Punishment Room. These films were swiftly criticized by authorities; Raine quotes the minister of education as saying, “Youth today has taiyozoku tendencies—these must be removed!” Nikkatsu bowed to pressure to stop making these movies, for a few years at least.
But with Everything Goes Wrong, the genre roared back to life, a blistering, self-obliterating work that displays director Seijun Suzuki’s restless experimentation. The film toggles through a rolodex of styles, teeming with elegant widescreen compositions by cinematographer Izumi Hagiwara, framing the bar as a den of Boschian iniquities, but also capturing on-the-street conversations with a documentary-like use of telephoto zooms – including a remarkable sequence where one of Jirō’s classmates confides in Toshimi that she is pregnant, and that she needs money for an abortion. Suzuki stages this at such a distance it robs it of any dramatic immediacy, but makes the crowded streets appear to be an ocean of anguish.
Suzuki throws a lot against the wall in this 71-minute cherry bomb of a movie, and when it explodes, it creates another path for a Japanese New Wave that was already transforming Japanese cinema, something the self-destructive Suzuki would continue to do through his wildly transgressive career.
