Bad Company

Eight years after This Window Is Yours, Furumaya returns with an extremely different follow-up: loosely structured and semi-improvised rather than hyper-controlled. His protagonists are teenage boys in a small town secondary school in 1980, under the thumb of a tyrannical teacher who divides humanity into a hierarchy (scum, delinquents and people) and consigns most of his class to the lowest category. Sadatomo and his friends are hauled up for shoplifting and told to write self-criticisms. Reflection sparks their rebellion and marks the point at which they begin to think and make real moral choices for themselves. Completely believable, the film's understated subtlety makes its political attack all the more powerful.