Kisses

A delivery boy meets an artist’s model when they are visiting their respective fathers in prison. After successfully gambling on a bicycle race, they spend an enjoyable day together. They hit the beach, attempt to reconcile with their families, and fall in love.

Kisses, with its stripped-down narrative and hand-held camerawork, is a sublime snapshot of aimless, post-war Japanese youth brimming with vitality and compassion and laced with carefree optimism and sincerity. A unique variation on the popular Sun Tribe genre in the 1950s.

With its liberated camera and even more liberated protagonists, this is the film which caused Nagisa Oshima to declare that ‘a powerful, irresistible force has arrived in Japanese cinema.’