“Typhoon Club” candidly captures the whirlwind of adolescence

Shinji Sōmai’s 1985 resonant coming-of-age drama screens in a new 4K restoration at UW Cinematheque on July 11.

Part of the pain of adolescence is realizing that the formalities of the adult world are mostly bullshit, and that the adults in it are perpetuating nonsensical rules out of habit, fear, or desire for personal gain. Another part of that pain stems from trying out new behaviors, identities, and ways of being just to see what sticks, despite potential pushback from your peers and authority figures. Every so often the veil is pierced and social structures are loosened, even if for only a little while.

For example, a group of teens may find themselves stuck in their high school during a typhoon, with no hope that the ineffectual parents, teachers, or other so-called “grown-ups” will come to retrieve them. This is the case in Shinji Sōmai’s coming-of-age drama Typhoon Club (1985), which screens in a new 4K restoration at UW Cinematheque on Thursday, July 11, at 7 p.m. 

As a director, Sōmai is regarded as a master in his native Japan, but only recently have his films become commercially available internationally, owing partially to his early death in 2001 at the age of 53. Part of that can also be attributed to his refusal to give foreign press easily digestible soundbites about his films during their festival premieres in the ’80s and ’90s. (The recent Blu-ray release includes an interview with friend and fellow director Kiyoshi Kurosawa, who recounts Sōmai describing one of his films as “an octopus” when asked what it was about during a Berlin Film Festival press conference.)

Some of his films are now being restored and distributed, further boosted in profile by those he worked with who have gained notoriety themselves, like the aforementioned director Kurosawa. And UW-Madison campus programmers are continuing their exhibition of Sōmai’s work, following two well-received screenings of Moving (1993) at this year’s Wisconsin Film Festival.

Sōmai is adept at capturing unmediated youthful perspective; and though Typhoon Club concerns the teens’ burgeoning awareness of the rules of the adult world, there’s little in the way of John Hughes-style life lessons and pat endings. The film introduces its main cast when several girls discover their male classmate Akira (Toshiyuki Mastunaga) spying on them, and decide to hold his head underwater. The girls quickly regret the decision when he doesn’t appear to be breathing. And yet, thankfully, he comes back to life, wondering why everyone is looking so concerned, and simply goes home. 

Accepting whatever situation they’re in is the one recourse the characters have to their unique circumstances. Some, like Rie (pop idol Youki Kudoh, who went on to star in Jim Jarmusch’s Mystery Train), leave the school to wander around alone. Others, like Michiko (Yuka Ohnishi) face constant harassment; Ken (Shigeru Benibayashi) becomes a maladjusted harasser. Kyoichi (Yuichi Mikami) is overcome by disgust fueled by teenage moral certitude, and Yasuko (Tomoko Aizawa), Midori (Yuriko Fuchizaki), and Yumi (Ryuko Tendoh) explore their sexuality with each other after school.

A kind of new hierarchal society forming in the isolation of the school recalls The Drifting Classroom (1987), another Japanese teen movie of its era by a fellow neglected master, Nobuhiko Obayashi. (And, of course, Lord Of The Flies is a touchstone, though nothing dramatic enough to have lasting consequences happens until almost the end of the film.) Sōmai is at once less fantastical and more dreamy than Obayashi, letting his signature long takes unfold to capture the quiet pain of anticipation of something, anything, on a stormy summer night. Sōmai’s capturing of the immediacy of teenage emotions has rarely been replicated, which is why Typhoon Club resonates almost 40 years later.