parade of the blind
by
Douglas Messerli
Toshio
Matsumoto (writer and director) Bara no
sôretsu (Funeral Parade of Roses)
/ 1969, USA 1970
I had
heard of Japanese director Toshio Matsumoto’s outrageous melodrama of 1969
earlier, but had almost forgotten about it until my Facebook friend Joe Amato
reported, coincidentally on my birthday, that he had just seen “Funeral Parade
of Roses,” and asked several others as well had we ever seen it? I had not, but
fortunately another friend, Aldon Nielsen soon after posted a link where we
might watch it for free, which led me to seek it out as an odd birthday
activity.
Funeral
Parade of Roses is surely the kind of film many might wish to avoid, let
alone view it on a special holiday. With influences from Godard, Resnais, Jonas
Mekas, and Jack Smith—and influence upon,
so critics argue, Stanley Kubrick—Matsumoto’s film is not so much a “narrative”
as it is a sort of slow-motioned testimony to Japanese outsiderness.
Eddie (Pîtâ) a transsexual “gay” (today
seeming contradictory terms, which are nonetheless appropriate to the time in
which movie was made when those who engaged in homosexual behavior of any kind
were described as “roses” in Japanese culture) is in bed with Jimi (Yoshiji Jo).
The two, a bit as in Resnais’ Hiroshima
mon amour and Smith’s Flaming
Creatures, are engaged in deep, lustful sex, their bodies becoming almost inseparable.
If Eddie later seems a bit unsure of her/his sexuality, it is clear she loves
Jimi, and is willing to do almost anything to keep him near.
In fact, they spend much of the rest of
the movie driving around while trying to avoid the inevitable encounter with
Jimi’s other lover, Leda (Osamu Ogasawara), a mean-spirited owner of the local bar and intensely jealous transsexual.
The voyage of these two, Eddie and Jimi—accompanied
by various pop songs, contemporary and classical—take us through Tokyo’s
underground world, filled with other transsexuals and “roses”—as I’ve hinted,
the sexual lines are not clearly drawn—as they talk about their sexuality
without being able successfully to explain it even to themselves. And
accordingly, we might describe these travels as a kind of “parade,” each of
them desiring to be seen while also hiding within their own sexual confusions
and, given the level of Japanese fascination with yet homophobia of the day, necessarily
somewhat secretive.
At the same time, we are also privy to
momentary flashbacks to Eddie’s childhood, which seems to suggest that he was
not only molested but perhaps witness to a murder, which calls up another
brilliantly outré Japanese film, Susumu Hani’s Hatsukoi:
Jigoku-hen (Nanami: The Inferno of
First Love), a film which combines a first heterosexual love with child
abuse and pedophilia.
Yet Matsumoto’s film attempts to
accomplish, despite its rather forbidden characters, a movie that is also about
filmmaking. If this work’s various characters are all about identity (or lack
of identity), so too are they attempting to discover (or rediscover themselves)
through the outsized figures they are portraying on screen. One might easily
argue that Matsumoto’s “roses” stand in for the strongly heterosexual figures
of Godard’s Contempt and Pierrot le Fou, as the director here
keeps calling “cut,” which forces us to see this parade of identities as an truly
artificial thing such as the film shoots of Contempt—in
fact, that first scene is, in some senses a reenactment of the first scene of
Godard’s film—while at the same time presenting us a wide-range of cinematic
genres as in Pierrot le Fou with its actors constantly looking
in the rear-view mirror or turning to the backseat as if to seek our approval.
From a love story, Matsumoto’s drifts
into a road film, a documentary, a satire of self-satisfied artists and other
filmmakers—as critic Simon Abrams notes, “Some of them, like pontificating
stoner beardo Guevara (Toyosaburo Uchiyama), solemnly quote their favorite
artists.”—a kind of existential drama of selfhood that cannot quite be properly
linguistically expressed, a horror film of childhood memories, a kind of “rose
bowl” parade, and, finally, a revenge tragedy that ends in a violent “Oedipus
Rex”-like blinding. Far more ambitious than any Hollywood film, Matsumoto’s “funeral
parade” may not be as gloriously slick as many a great movie, but its mind and
heart is so deeply involved that, finally, this becomes a film we simply cannot
ignore. We have to watch these “drag-queens,” transsexuals, “roses,” whatever
you want to call them, play out their imagined lives and destinies. And to any
open-minded individual they utterly enchant and amaze us along the way.
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