From Sailor Suit, Machine Gun and Love Hotel director Shinji Somai comes Typhoon Club(1985), a Japanese coming-of-age tale which follows a small group of students who find themselves locked in their school while one hell of a storm rages around them. However, that storm could never match the tempest of adolescent romance, grief and emerging self-revelations which are taking place among the students. 

Now you may think that this plot synopsis is brief, well there’s good reason for that; Typhoon Club is not a film concerned with narrative, but rather is concerned with studying its teenage protagonists in what are essentially the cinematic equivalent of laboratory conditions. It’s a fascinating set-up because I feel like it adds a jeopardy that American films like The Breakfast Club or Fast Times at Ridgemont High lacked; the film uses this storm as a perfect piece of pathetic fallacy. Reflecting our tumultuous teens’ ever shifting emotional state with this storm which keeps them trapped together and having to face up to each others flaws allows Somai’s movie to really cut to the core of what it feels to be an adolescent in society which just wants you to follow the rules and be good in school.

There’s a rawness to this coming-of-age story that is rarely seen in other films from the genre, there’s a strong sense of honesty surrounding how the film presents the lives of its teenage characters as imperfect. Romantic relationships between characters are fleeting and often shown as flawed or transgressive in some way, at one point leading to possibly the most shocking and horrifying presentations of sexual assault I’ve seen in a film; a scene which presents the male student involved as a thoughtless machine which stands kicking in a wooden door over a harrowing absence of score or dialogue. There’s an immediate contrast with the many joyful dance segments of the film where the students strip to their underwear and parade around in the assembly hall or in the pouring rain; a rather on the nose metaphor for overcoming the inner storm of being a teenager or young adult. Somai’s lens is far from rose-tinted, he portrays youth as an undiscovered country which is difficult to look back on and find a clear or concrete singular emotion. He knows that to be a teenager is inherently confusing and nonsensical at points as you struggle to figure out difficult emotions and feelings, but there’s always a sympathy for his characters at the core of each scene; an appreciation of all the joy that can come from growing up, despite the hardships of first relationships or new and unknown attractions.

Now the only aspect I think I’m going to struggle to talk about here is the film’s cast. While the film is focused on studying the characters, it’s focus in on how their situation reflects this period of their life rather than how they develop as people and how the typhoon changes them. This is by no means me saying that these performances are devoid of anything worth talking about, it is just that they are difficult to individualise and talk about from a person-to-person level. Each performer manages to capture something unique about the trials of growing up, allowing the full cast to fit together like jigsaw puzzle of teenage angst. But if you isolated the performances on their own, then it would be difficult to draw attention to anything they do particularly well without considering the whole ensemble.

The special features are an interesting selection on this Blu-Ray from Third Window Films. The headlining features are a pair of audio commentaries; one for the whole feature by Tom Mes and one for selected key scenes by Josh Slater-Williams. Now I actually went through the Slater-Williams track and found it added a new dimension to some scenes which I knew had just passed me by on their first viewing. Also included on the disc is Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s (Drive My Car and Wheel of Fortune of Fantasy) loving introduction to the film’s presentation at the Berlin Film Festival which saw the reveal of the film’s new 4K remaster. Finally,we have a talk from the film’s assistant director Koji Enokido which gives some interesting insights to some of the behind-the-scenes stories of the film, which is nice since we lack a traditional making-of documentary on this disc.

Overall I think this has sold me on the style of Somai, I’ll try and make an effort to seek out his other dramas based on the strength of how he presents the honesty humanity that exists within his protagonists. Had this movie been populated by a more memorable cast of characters and actors then I think much more of it may have stuck in the mind, but the actors are by no means bad at all and they do a lot with their work despite this not being a film focused on developing characters too deeply. Typhoon Club has a decent selection of special features however I wish there something akin to a traditional behind-the-scenes documentary, mostly because I do want to hear more from the actors’ experiences in particular.