Nijisseiki shonen dokuhon
Japan,
1989, 106 min
Shown in 1990
CREDITS
- dir
-
Kaizô Hayashi
- prod
-
Hisamitsu Hida, Yoichi Sakurai
- scr
-
Kaizô Hayashi
- cam
-
Yuichi Nagata
- editor
-
Osamu Tanaka
- cast
-
Hiroshi Mikami, Shu Ken, Moe Kamura, Michiru Akiyoshi
- source
-
Shibata Organiation Inc., 2-10-8 Ginza, Cho-Ku, Tokyo, Japan, FAX: 3-545-3519
-
COMMENTS
Kaizô Hayashi and Hiroshi Mikami attended the screening.
OTHER
Everybody loves a circus, perhaps filmmakers most of all. The circus was a pre-cinema world of innocence and illusion, a place where magic happened and filmmakers from George Méliès to Fellini and Bergman to Wim Wenders have recognized the natural affinity between circus sleight-of-hand and the dream-making machinery of the cinema. Perhaps its original Japanese title, The Boy's Own Book of the 20th Century, best reveals Circus Boys' affinity with the wonder-filled worlds of children's stories of decades ago, as it spins a fairy tale about two young brothers in a not-so-great traveling troupe of clowns, acrobats… and one wonderful elephant. The two brothers, Jinta and the younger Wataru, grow up with big-top visions of becoming trapeze and tightrope stars. Fate, of course, intervenes and Jinta, now a young man, strikes out on his own, leaving behind his brother and the warmth of his adopted family. Circus Boys then becomes two stories, one of the struggling small-time circus, the other of Jinta's journeys as a con man, a "master of lies" who swindles poor villagers with fake "miracle" products. Between the two stories, writer-director Kaizô Hayashi perfectly evokes the way—though hopes get replaced by real life—some dreams never die. Shot in sparkling black-and-white, Circus Boys is a haunting, magical film and it ends on a note of sheer poetry.
—Tod Booth
FACTOID #123
San Francisco native Mervyn LeRoy, director of the Hollywood classics Little Caesar and Goldiggers of 1933, was honored with the Festival’s first tribute October 22, 1965.
