Farewell to Dream (1956)

 Keisuke Kinoshita's "Farewell to Dream"


While Keisuke Kinoshita's 1956 film "Farewell to Dream" operates as a familial drama on the surface, its social implications are what makes the film a stand out in his career. It is both equally touching and devastating and its emotional resonance make it one of Kinoshita's best films. What's even more notable is the fact that the film was written by Kinoshita's younger sister, Yoshiko Kusuda. 

The film centers on a young boy named Yoichi, the middle child of a family that owns a fish market. He dreams of becoming a seaman, but his dreams are slowly stripped away through various circumstances surround his family's economic issues, his sister's erratic behavior, and his father's failing health. The burdens of his family slowly start to become his problem and he must adjust his life accordingly. 

"Farewell to Dream" is essentially a coming-of-age story. However, this coming-of-age story is more socially pointed than most. Because of the preceding war, Yoichi's family is economically trapped by their circumstances, unable to get themselves free of their economic circumstances. This has tremendous ripple effects. The eldest daughter, Toyoko, becomes uncontrollable and decides to marry a rich, older man against her family's wishes. Their father, Genkicki, develops a heart condition from all the stress and can't continue to maintain the fish market. This forces Yoichi to have to take over for him, ultimately giving up his dream and chaining himself to a life as a fishmonger forever.

The way in which Kinoshita unravels this family's life is directly indicate of the fallouts of the war. Kinoshita continuously condemns Japan's involvement in the Second World War through stories of families and how negatively affected they are by it. I feel as though the point really gets through these individualized stories of personal tragedy and hardship, rather than direct criticism. The devastation the war caused wasn't just immediate, its affects lasted a long time after it ended and affected so many people in such devastating ways. In the circumstances of "Farewell to Dream," it completely upended an entire family's life, ended the childhood of its protagonist, and took away his entire future.

Kinoshita takes his sister's melancholic screenplay and spins gold through his touching close-ups and mise-en-scene to make a powerful film about the loss of innocence and the loss of a future. "Farewell to Dream" slowly takes away everything from a family and the reasons for this fate are not lost on the viewer, thanks to its themes and social provocations. 






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