The Drama pales next to Oshima’s masterpiece.
Charlie and Emma, the twentysomething Boston couple in The Drama, are fake characters played with charming tics, moues, and chortles by Robert Pattinson and Zendaya. Fears about their impending wedding mean they present real-life Gen Z panic. They’re the affluent, pampered generation cruising along until they become preoccupied with superficial ethics. Newsy social crises leave them unable to accept mutual love, so the cute pair torment each other and the audience.
The meta cruelty of A24’s The Drama contrasts with the classic 1960 Japanese New Wave film Cruel Story of Youth, by Nagisa Oshima, recently released on Blu-Ray by Criterion. Oshima examined Japan’s lost generation of post-WWII adolescents alienated by life under the U.S.-Japan Anpo Security Treaty. Students Kiyoshi (Yûsuke Kawazu) and Makoto (Miyuki Kuwano) vent their frustrations through premature sex and violence (gang fights, rape, honey-pot crime schemes).
Oshima’s film is social and psychological criticism — pop art made in the style of Rebel Without a Cause, Hollywood’s CinemaScope teen spectacle. (Oshima’s blood-red title credits are splashed across newspaper headlines.) It contrasts with The Drama’s attitudinal tease — writer-director Kristoffer Borgli offers the shallow melodrama of streaming service content that flatters its market.
Over 75 years, filmmakers depict human behavior differently — an era of heated emotional intensity gave way to contemporary frigidity.
Pattinson and Zendaya respectively portray white British expatriate museum curator Charlie and biracial Emma as Millennials tokens. Both belong to the Cambridge bourgeoisie whose sweet non-talk is peppered with the f-word, not for authenticity, but to break monotony. “I love how you always find a way to turn my drama into a comedy,” Charlie says of Emma’s flirtatiousness. Their hipster verbal posturing shows us a generation averse to recognizing their true selves. What we take to be intimacy is unlike the revelations that made Ibsen and Strindberg eternally compelling. Borgli’s method makes interpersonal realism facile, the better to hit on political topics as the film’s major concern.
The Drama juxtaposes Charlie and Emma with the interracial-mirror best friends Mike and Rachel (Mamoudou Athies and Alana Haim), who play a truth-or-dare game in which all four are to tell the worst thing they’ve ever done — a confession where private regret mixes with humble bragging. Charlie and Emma lose this friendship test because Emma’s confession — as a picked-upon outsider in high school she planned (but never carried out) mass-murder revenge against her bullies — disturbs everyone, especially Charlie, who fears he’s engaged to a psychopath, and Emma, who resorts to vomiting fits.
This evasiveness ruins The Drama (the title is urban slang for unnecessary tension and acting-out), whereas Oshima captured the inner drama of youth who become self-destructive. Oshima dared what Borgli won’t, calling his film Cruel Story in response to the 1950s genre in Japan of adolescent dramas that exploited social dilemmas without resolving them. Oshima confronts the sexual tension that confounds Millennial American filmmakers. Makoto tests her own sexuality against her more experienced sister Yuki (Yoshiko Kuga), while Kiyoshi hides his larger experience as the kept boy of an older woman.
Through sexual frankness (Kiyoshi’s abuse, Makoto’s submission; his gangsterism, her abortion), Oshima gets at how a generation internalizes society’s values. Borgli merely reflects the sexual fear and confusion behind trendy political positions. In The Drama, political-cliché “gun violence” is the catalyst for each character’s self-righteousness. A scene where Charlie flips through a mysterious art book titled Brain Rot, with photos of half-naked women bearing guns, offers a clue to a generalized social malfunction that infects and destroys friendship. It also defines Charlie’s fear of Emma — especially during the frankly ludicrous wedding reception at which various familial and business deceptions are exposed.
Oshima, often considered the Japanese Godard, shames the shallowness of The Drama. Evidently, Borgli doesn’t know that Oshima’s Cruel Story rivals Godard’s tale of new age sociopathy-plus-romance in Breathless. Instead, Borgli’s cinematic miseducation is evident when Charlie imitates a milquetoast version of the spousal nude scene in Robert Altman’s Olympian Short Cuts. Borgli also mentions Louis Malle’s once-controversial Lacombe, Lucien to validate his gun-control topic.
The Drama needs to match more recent breakthroughs, such as James Sweeney’s Twinless or Straight Up. Without Sweeney’s insight, Borgli misrepresents how young lovers use language and masks to hide their scariest private feelings. The Drama’s cruelty toward its audience matches the triteness of TikTok “verticles” and HBO’s soft-core Euphoria. Knowing what it meant for a society to betray its youth, Oshima wasn’t afraid of telling a timeless heartbreaking story.
