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 No Regrets for Our Youth More at IMDbPro »Waga seishun ni kuinashi (original title)

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12 out of 13 people found the following review useful:
Heartfelt story of Personal Courage, 1 September 2004
9/10
Author: J. M. Verville from Seoul, Republic of Korea

The technical aspects of the film are very good. The camera used in this film uses abnormally slow shutter speeds causing the most slight (yet noticeable) distortions in movement, lending to the film a certain artistic sense that others do not have. It gives almost an eerie sense to it, and often times it seems to be somewhat drab, however: it seems to add very much to the mood of the story.

In addition to the artistic filming itself, the script truly drives the story and leads us to believe more of what Akira Kurosawa believed -- anti-Fascism, anti-Militarism, through the portrayal of events concerning Japanese imperial rule in the film. Through the eyes of Yukie we learn what it is like to be oppressed, and we learn the strength of the human spirit in its' resolute resistance to the militarism and fascism of her day; the power of the will is truly highlighted in this film, and the persistent commitment to doing good (similar to that portrayed by Watanabe in Ikiru) is very present.

The flashbacks to youth, the conjuring of memories, and the portrayal of the good times right next to the bad times, and the depth of human emotion that is revealed truly makes this film something worth watching. Some of the emotionality of the scenes (especially Yukie's emotional moments) portrays the existential angst that we all have, and her strength & perseverance represent everything we would like to have. It was a truly impacting story.

I was especially keen on the ability of Akira Kurosawa to take some of the most inward, personal moments of extreme sadness and put them into the film and, without any seeming prior explanation, the viewer is able to relate in their own way. This film highlights a philosophy of oneself against the world, and the importance of being true to one self. The message was portrayed very clearly and the end result is a masterpiece of Cinema that is greatly overlooked.

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8 out of 8 people found the following review useful:
A terrific Setsuko Hara/Kurosawa film, 5 September 2004
Author: gkbazalo from Scottsdale, AZ

In my opinion, all of Kurosawa's films from 1946 through 1966 (I've seen about 18 which are available on video) are highly recommended. They are not only good the first time through, but hold up to multiple viewings. The star of No Regrets For our Youth is Setsuko Hara, who also starred in Kurosawa's The Idiot and in several Yasujiro Ozu films including Tokyo Story and Early Summer. From what I have heard on the commentaries, she was a big, big star in Japan and it's easy to see why. She conveys a tremendous amount of emotion and generates great sympathy for her characters. She was outstanding in Tokyo Story. We also have a short appearance by Takashi Shimura as a bad guy.

I was very impressed by how the film made the characters convincing in both the first act where they are college students, and then again nearly 10 years later. The characters have changed not only in appearance but in personality and mannerisms. It made the passing years very convincing.

The film is interesting from both an historical viewpoint and as a pure drama. This was made just a year or so after the Japanese surrender in World War II, and we get a good feel for how the militaristic government in Japan was able to gain the unquestioning support of most of the population. Some things never change, do they?

Highly recommended, although if you are starting out on Kurosawa, you may want to try something from the 1955 to 66 period.

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8 out of 9 people found the following review useful:
Political Passions Flared by Kurosawa and Hara in Post-WWII Japan, 17 April 2008
8/10
Author: Ed Uyeshima from San Francisco, CA, USA

I could hardly believe the actress playing the mercurial Yukie would soon be playing the serene and self-effacing Noriko in Yasujiro Ozu's home drama classics such as "Early Summer" and "Tokyo Story". Such was Setsuko Hara's versatility and malleability that she could move easily between Ozu's saintly goddess and Akira Kurosawa's passionate, reluctant heroine in this 1946 anti-war melodrama. In his first post-WWII film and the only one he ever made focused on a female protagonist, Kurosawa (with co-writer Eijirô Hisaita) has fashioned an emotionally ripe, politically charged and time-spanning story around Yukie, the daughter of a college professor, a one-time idealist who loses his job in face of the growing fascism engulfing Japan in 1933. Beautiful and skating precariously on the surface of her life, she finds herself caught between two men, both former students of her father - Noge, the son of peasant rice farmers, who becomes a secretive anti-war activist, and Itokawa, the conservative prosecutor and a symbol of the passive conformity that allowed Japan to enter a no-win war.

Yukie is excited by Noge's political passion, and they begin an intense, inevitably short-lived affair. When Noge goes to prison, she becomes politically enlightened to Japan's oppressive state, and after he dies, she decides to take his ashes to his parents and stay with them to work the fields. She endures a great deal of hardship, both from his uncaring parents and neighbors, who harass the family of a "traitor". Against the odds, Yukie endures and triumphs and despite a brief sojourn back to Kyoto, realizes her life is far more fulfilling with the peasants. Much of the plot is rather convoluted and the storyline jumpy, as the politically motivated Kurosawa seems more interested in drawing certain emotional responses from the viewer. Clarity is only a secondary consideration here, as he busily applies much of the visual flair that he would exhibit with greater impact in his later masterworks like "Rashomon" and "Seven Samurai".

Even at this early stage in his directorial career (it's only his fifth film), there are a number of his stylistic touches evident - a series of quick freeze shots to illustrate Yukie's traumatized response behind a closed door to Noge's surprise departure; the use of a slow exposure camera that causes an unearthly (and sometimes irritating) blurring effect when people are in motion; people lying in a pastoral setting staring skywards (mimicked recently by Chinese filmmakers like Yimou Zhang); Yukie's oddly exaggerated, out-of-sync piano playing; and large crowds rushing down steps in an Eisenstein-like manner. However, the film gains real emotional heft toward the end when Yukie struggles in the rice fields with Noge's mother (played almost unrecognizably by another Ozu regular, Haruko Sugimura) under Yukie's mantra of the dead husband/son, "No regrets in my life, no regrets whatsoever". It's a moving sequence which brings the story to its resonant conclusion.

Proving why she was one of Japan's favorite post-WWII film stars, Hara is superb in showing Yukie's initial flightiness and evolving political consciousness. The other performances are reasonable but hardly as memorable - Susumu Fujita as Noge, Akitake Kono as Itokawa (whom Yukie rejects at the end as unworthy to know where Noge's grave is due likely to his pro-war stance) and Denjiro Okochi as Yukie's father. The combination of the illustrious Kurosawa and the incandescent Hara is certainly compelling enough to warrant viewing.

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6 out of 6 people found the following review useful:
Fight for Freedom, 12 December 2010
8/10
Author: Claudio Carvalho from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

In 1933, in Kyoto, the academic freedom is under attack and the spoiled daughter of Professor Yagihara (Denjirô Ôkôchi), Yukie Yagihara (Setsuko Hara), is courted by the idealistic student Ruykichi Noge (Susumu Fujita) and by the tolerant Itokawa (Akitake Kôno). When the academic freedom is crushed by the fascists, Professor Yagihara and the members of the Faculty of Law resigns from their positions and Noge is arrested.

Five years later, Noge visits Professor Yagihara and his family under the custody of the now Prosecutor Itokawa and tells that he is going to China. Yukie decides to move alone to Tokyo and years later, she meets Itokawa in Tokyo and he tells that Noge is living in Tokyo. Yukie visits Noge and they become lovers.

In 1941, Noge is arrested accused of ringleader of a spy network and Yukie is also sent to prison. When she is released, sooner she learns that Noge died in prison and she decides to move to the peasant village where Noge's parents live and are blamed of being spies by the villagers. She changes her lifestyle and works hard with Madame Noge (Haruko Sugimura) planting rice and earning the respect of her mother and father-in-law. With the end of the war, freedom is restored in the defeated Japan and the flowers blossom again.

Japanese militarists used the Manchurian Incident as a pretext to press the public for support to invade the Asian mainland. Any opposing ideology was denounced as "Red". The Kyoto University Incident a.k.a. Takigawa Incident was one example of this tactic.

Using this historical event and the Japanese tradition as background, Akira Kurosawa released in 1946 the fictional "Waga seishun ni kuinashi" a.k.a. "No Regret for Our Youth" to disclose the lack of freedom in Japan of those years. I do not recall in this moment any other film of this great director with such strong female character. Further, Kurosawa seems to be influenced by Yasujirô Ozu disclosing the relationship of Yukie with her family first and with Noge's parents in the second half of his story. My vote is eight.

Title (Brazil): "Não Lamento Minha Juventude" ("No Regret for Our Youth")

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6 out of 6 people found the following review useful:
Wow, 27 April 2008
10/10
Author: crossbow0106 from United States

Obstensibly it is a story about Hun, played by Setsuko Hara, who falls in love with a spy, in a time of great turmoil and protests to combat fascism. What makes it a 10 star film is that as it goes along it becomes much more absorbing, with the characters becoming deeper in their beliefs. Here it is: Setsuko Hara does an amazing job playing the young girl. This is her first great role and I was astounded by the depth of her performance. She plays sweet, young, very pretty, but over the course of the film, which spans approximately 11 years, she falls not on hard times, but wields a meditation on personal sacrifice. Having only seen her up to now in Ozu films, I thought she was one of the greatest. Now, I know she was. She plays this character with everything. She even credibly ages over the film. You have to give Mr. Kurosawa credit also, of course, but Ms. Hara's performance makes this an incredible film, which only gets better as it goes along. This film is now part of a box set, and very highly recommended. Any complaints, which I'll mention but are very minor, are sometimes the subtitles are wrong and the film is at times blurry when there is movement (I have this film on an earlier box set, maybe these problems have been rectified). Just know that this is an incredibly absorbing film starring the excellent Setsuko Hara and directed by the great Akira Kurosawa. That alone makes this worth the price of admission, and it delivers wonderfully.

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7 out of 8 people found the following review useful:
Fascinating early Kurosawa melodrama, 18 September 2003
8/10
Author: David (davidals@msn.com) from Chapel Hill, NC, USA

*** This review may contain spoilers ***

*Some spoilers*

Made and released during the American occupation of Japan, NO REGRETS FOR OUR YOUTH is an intriguing – albeit somewhat flawed – early effort from Akira Kurosawa, offering rare insight into his worldview and autobiography, while also hinting at the many future masterpieces that would soon make him a cinematic legend.

**SPOILER ALERT**

Much of the convoluted story occurs in an academic, intellectual setting – centered on Yukie (Setsuko Hara), a somewhat sheltered and spoiled college student, and the daughter of a college professor. Her father had once been something of an idealist, but, having settled into comfortable university tenure, has grown more apolitical with the passage of time. Yukie is largely oblivious to events around her (the increasingly fascist drift of Japanese politics) until she meets, falls in love with and marries popular communist student activist Noge (Susumu Fujita), who is the only son of an impoverished farming family. With very little warning, Noge is arrested, and dies while in police custody. Grief-stricken, Yukie first withdraws, and then abandons her otherwise-comfortable urban life to take up residence with Noge's embittered family. Working as a rice farmer, she slowly gains their respect and admiration.

NO REGRETS is among the only one of Kurosawa's films with a female protagonist, and is considerably more florid in its' melodrama than most of his films, but nonetheless is still a bit more obviously personal – as a college student, Kurosawa scandalized his family by becoming an art student and flirting with far-left ideologies, before taking a low-wage entry-level job at a film company. With the beginning of the occupation, Kurosawa was free to abandon the positive, nationalistic themes that wartime Japanese censors imposed upon the studios. The end result was an intriguing mix of melodrama – lots of tears, tears, more tears, and backbreaking work in NO REGRETS – and a nuanced utopian idea: the educated and middle-classes can only truly know themselves (simultaneously gaining the respect of rural peasants) through some soul-defining manual labor. Here, that ideology is refreshingly un-strident, and the idealists of NO REGRETS are also individualists – which in a truly utopian socialist society would be a 'contradiction' – Yukie's choice of going to the country is voluntary, as was the idealistic activism of Noge. The value of individualism over ideological purity (or consensus) would soon emerge as a major theme running through Kurosawa's work – as he turned away from the overt leftism of his youth, his protagonists (and antagonists) would increasingly take the form of noble - if limited - individualists: the dying bureaucrat of IKIRU, the self-absorbed ronin of YOJIMBO, the country doctor of RED BEARD, the ambitious executive suddenly paralyzed by a crippling dilemma in HIGH & LOW.

Stylistic devices well-used in later Kurosawa films were also fine-tuned here: the beautiful, sun-drenched intensity of the opening scenes clearly hints towards RASHOMON, and the deluges Yukie works through after moving to the country are an early example of Kurosawa's famed fondness for using extremes of nature to underscore characters' emotional state.

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5 out of 5 people found the following review useful:
Japanese neorealism - the fight against fascism in Japan, 22 December 2008
9/10
Author: andrabem from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

I went to my local DVD rental store and found this early Kurosawa made just after the end of the World War 2. Curiously this film, "No regrets for my youth" was dubbed in Italian. This was kind of annoying as I like to see the films in their original language, but anyway as I've already seen so many films dubbed in English, why not Italian? Well, maybe it was the Italian dubbing, but I couldn't fail to see the similarity between "No regrets for my youth" and the neorealist films made in Italy just after the war. Coincidence? Anyway, Kurosawa was mainly influenced by the Soviet cinema.

"No regrets for my youth" tells the story of the fight of some students against the militarist regime in Japan and their different destinies throughout the years, but the film focuses mainly on Yukie, that we see in the beginning, just as a spoilt girl, flirting with revolutionary games. She's very sensitive and soon notices how alienated from reality she is. The military government is slowly tightening its iron grip and silencing the opposition. Idealism has become dangerous in Japan.

Yukie now sees what's happening. She's very passionate in whatever she does. Yukie makes no compromises, but she's no fool either. The film will describe her journey - first, the fires of adolescence when the world seems to be out there just to fulfill her wishes, then self-awareness, fight, disillusion, suffering.... She and her friends will arrive to different conclusions and tread different roads.

In a way, "No regrets for my youth" is a coming of age film, in which politics, emotion and sex play an important role. Yukie wants to find her place in the world. She's not satisfied with her life and she's not satisfied with the world in which she's living. She wants to change them. "No regrets for my youth" shows how she tries to live up to her ideals.

In "No regrets for my youth" (as I said before) we feel the influence the Soviet (and Italian) masters had on Kurosawa. We see here a young Kurosawa - more spontaneous and enthusiastic (another Kurosawa film, more or less, along the same line is "Stray Dog" that takes place in post-war Japan). The camera is used effectively to show the landscape and people. The acting is more natural. We are spared the exaggerated gestures and movements that are seen in some of his later films. Setsuko Hara who plays Yukie is an extraordinary actress. She helps the film to achieve a truly great emotional depth. Highly recommended!

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4 out of 7 people found the following review useful:
A great docu-drama about the military takeover of Japan., 24 August 2001
10/10
Author: gordon-31 from Irvine, CA

This is a very important film for Kurosawa and expresses the deep concern felt by Japanese liberals when the military took over Japan in the 1930's. The Thought Police arrested anyone who did not totally support the military and the War in China. People were afraid to express their thoughts even to close friends.

Thought control was complete in Japan and the Japanese people believed they were winning the war until the very end. All the news sources available only told of great victories even though great defeats were taking place.

It was a terrible time for liberals until the Americans occupied Japan. They quickly shut down the Thought Police and allowed freedom of thought and expression for the first time in over a decade. That is what Kurosawa is telling us about.

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Deserves a second viewing, 12 June 2011
4/10
Author: pdbarrett from UK

When I watched this film on DVD for the first time, I thought it was spoilt by the pro-Occupation Authorities propaganda which Kurosawa lays onto the film with a trowel. The initial (written) statement about Japanese militarism, the occasional political statements on the same theme by Noge during the film, the portrayal of Noge (a man who however much I might agree with his ideas, was undoubtedly a traitor to his country), were all no doubt exactly what the Occupation Authorities wanted the Japanese people to hear. Whether the Japanese people wanted to hear them is much more doubtful; and more doubtful still is that they (as the film suggests) agreed. Which was a pity, I thought, because there's a good film here trying to get out.

However, it's my custom to watch films twice when I can, and after a second viewing my opinion has changed somewhat. The propaganda is still intrusive, and it doesn't improve the film one bit, but it's localised to the beginning, the middle, and a few utterances in between, and it's possible to wince and concentrate on the story, particularly the final half hour or so, in which propaganda is (almost) dispensed with. Yukie's change from city girl to villager is shown brilliantly by her clothes, the way she drinks, and the tan on her face (though the tan has mysteriously disappeared when she wears Western clothes again at the very end of the film, so perhaps it was just dirt). And the effect of the villagers whisperings on her is shown in the same way as the similar scene in Hakuchi where Kameda gets the same treatment from horses' bridle bells. It's possible to see Kurosawa experimenting with techniques he would use in later films, something which is itself interesting.

A final note on Setsuko Hara's performance as Yukie: a number of people have commented on this, and I have to say that it's one of the best I've seen from her (obviously, I haven't seen them all), along with those in Naruse's Meshi and Yama no Oto. We know her best in the West from her work with Ozu (at least, I did), but I can't help thinking that Ozu doesn't get the best from her. She plays pretty much the same character in every Ozu film I've seen her in, only the names and situations change - the mother in Late Autumn is the daughter in Late Spring, just several years older, and widowed and with a daughter of her own (and with a different name). For those who aren't sure just how good she was, this is worth watching.

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No Regrets, 3 May 2010
9/10
Author: GyatsoLa from Ireland

*** This review may contain spoilers ***

This is a very atypical Kurosawa and its said in some sources that he wasn't happy with the final result - he was working under the strict double censorship (Japanese and Occupation) at the time. But what we see now is a superb attempt to come to grips with responsibility for the war.

The story follows Yukie, a willful educated girl as she develops from a spoiled, self centered daughter of a respected academic, to the wife of a political radical who refuses to betray him. It features a remarkable performance from Setsuko Hara, unrecognisable from the nice, placid ladies she played so often for Ozu. The story is radical in its conception, making it explicit that it is the toughened, independent Hara, working in rice fields with her in laws is a more beautiful woman than the pretty 'nice' girl she once was. At least one feminist critic has described Yukie as the one truly liberated woman in all Japanese film history - it is hard to argue with this.

The film itself shows Kurosawa's by now effortless mastery of camera work and editing - the scene where Yukie defies a village to work in a rice paddy is spectacular and as good as you'll see from any film maker. It suffers a little from his debt to other film styles - Kurosawa had not yet developed his own unique vision.

The final scene - where Yukie looks at the camera as she recedes into the distance is heartbreaking in its ambiguity. Is she lost in a crowd, or resigned to her role in life? Either way, its one of the truly great final scenes. This is a truly great film, and shows that Kurosawa was a master of almost any genre he put his hand to.

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