in up to his neck
by Douglas Messerli
Nagisa Oshima
and Paul Mayersberg (screenplay, based on fictions by Laurens van der Post),
Nagisa Oshima (director) Senjō no Merī
Kurisumasu (Merry Christmas, Mr.
Lawrence) / 1983
It seems strange
to me that the Oshima movie I saw yesterday for the first time, should have
received such startlingly mixed reviews. Although the New York Times critic of the day, Janet Maslin, praised the work,
several of my favorite critics and even the popular writer Roger Ebert had
strong reservations when they did not out rightly attack it. Ebert noted its schizophrenic qualities, the
overwrought acting style of the Japanese figures as opposed to the realism of
the British and Dutch soldiers: “the results look odd, and eventually undermine
the film. We wonder, in some small irreverent corner of our minds, whether the
soft-spoken British notice that the Japanese rant and rave over everything,
including the weather, and whether the Japanese, in turn, find the British
catatonic.
One of the best minds of cinema, critic
Dave Kehr, was disturbed by Oshima’s tendencies to create a work that, at
times, morphed into Yukio Mishima’s exaggerated and tortured concerns with
sexuality and death (something surely, one might have expected from this
director of In the Realm of the Senses).
Even the gay-friendly reviewer from Time
Out seemed to agree with Ebert that the relationships between the Japanese
and English were too schematic, while adding that Oshima’s handling of the
narrative was “awkward” and David Bowie’s performance was “embarrassingly
wooden.” David Thomson, clearly not a fan of late Oshima films, found the movie
“came out bizarre, confused, and with little bearing on reality.”
Without suggesting that any of these fine
critics were reacting against the known and expressed atrocities of the
Japanese of this film or were unable to deal with the quite blatantly
homosexual themes of Ōshima’s work just a few years after the famed Stonewall
event in New York, one certainly cannot help but perceive that—although the
Japanese director had long ago dealt with all of these issues and had never
attempted, to my way of thinking, to present cinema as representing what we even
imaginatively describe as “real” life—the gathering of concerns about cultural
and sexual differences and links, the pushes and pulls that are at the center
of this film, did not make his work easy for American and British audiences. In
many ways, Ōshima wants to have it both ways, censuring both his own countrymen
and the British and Dutch soldiers for their values, while digging deep into
the sexual and violent aspects of the character’s lives, which in almost all
cases, are what we might call “complicated” by obsessions, betrayals, and
obfuscations that make up most human, if we were truly honest with ourselves, lives.
If we feel uneasy in the theatrical world
that the director has whipped up, that is just his point: beyond the vast
cultural gaps between the Japanese captors and the British prisoners, lay
terrifying similarities that, it appears, only Colonel John Lawrence (a
wonderful Tom Conti)—who speaks both Japanese and English, and has lived for a
time in Japan—can perceive. Like a kind of Christ-like go-between, Lawrence is
called upon by both sides, time and again, to translate, explain, represent and
possibly intercede in the impossible situations of a war-time camp in the
middle of Java. And, in this context, I would argue, Ōshima’s decision to
situate each cultural tradition in different acting styles seems perfect. While
the Japanese act out their obvious tensions in highly traditional, Kabuki-like
gestures, warring, praying, shouting, the British and the Dutch, in their
desperate attempts to just survive this war-time horror, huddle and whisper
together a bit like sheep, imagining, perhaps, that their very gentle
camaraderie might carry them through. Even the bigoted and loud spoken Group
Captain Hicksley (Jack Thompson), who huffs and puffs in pure bluff, has little
effect on the various situations he attempts to resolve. This is most
definitely not Bridge of the River Kwai,
wherein the British smugly outwit and best the Japanese Commander; Captain
Yonoi (an excellent Ryuichi Skamoto) and Sargent Gengo Hara (Takeshi Kitano)
may be both brutal and haunted by their pasts, but neither of them is stupid or
incompetent, which only Lawrence seems to perceive, which, in turn, is why they
call upon him again and again to intercede. By comparison, David Lean’s jingoistic,
marching soldiers seem to be like something out of Disney fantasy; these sick
and dying captives are sexually abused, bodily punished, and almost daily
threatened with death.
Only a few scenes later, Yonoi
encounters, in a trial in nearby Batavia, a godlike blonde of a hunk, Major
Jack Celliers (David Bowie, in what I believe is an absolute genius of
casting), who in his dismissive demeanor, and in his quite obviously
masculine-feminine blending of behavior, captivates the young Captain, who like
Celliers, survived a horrible war experience in Manchuria after he was left for
dead. Celliers’ obvious disdain for death, which seemingly matches the disdain
for dying expressed by all of the Japanese leaders, leads Yonoi to think of him
as a match, a foreign soldier somehow in the mold of his own Samurai ancestry.
He is wrong, and later admits to being “disappointed” with the beautiful
soldier. Celliers’ disdain does not arise from courage but rather from his
cynicism, his self-destructive urges embedded, as he tells Lawrence, in his
betrayal of his own, lovingly innocent and constantly-singing brother, whom at
school he refuses to protect from a brutal hazing. Even the implications of
that childhood event, that Celliers’ brother, in his soprano-voiced recitals of
invented songs of joy and love, is immediately recognized by his fellow students
as a “sissy-boy,” demonstrates Celliers’ own uncertainty of his own sexuality.
In betraying his innocent brother, who never sings again, Celliers has also
betrayed himself and cut himself away for love and normal life.
To me, this is one of the most powerful
moments in all of films, where a character not only responds to the
psychological intimidation daily played out against him, but accepts the
consequences for what might even be described as returning the obsessed man’s
love. Celliers has finally stood up for what his innocent brother was punished
for. As we have seen in the very first frames of this film, however, this is
not a world that can accept more than one reality—much like the critics, I
might suggest, whom I described at the beginning of this essay. Yonoi is dishonored,
and before the war’s end, dies. An even more ruthless leader condemns Celliers
to death by burying his body up to his neck in lime, leaving the man to suffer
in the sun until death. In a private moment, Yonoi stealthfully clips a lock of
would-be lover’s blonde mane, later commanding Hara to take the token to a
Japanese village to dedicate it at a shrine. So does this troubled British
soldier become a more important saint than the merry Santa Claus Hara has
pretended to be.
That is hard, I am certain, for men who
fought against the Japanese (and, for that matter, those on the German front)
to accept. That they might, many of them, have also felt strong feelings
throughout their close internment, for their own sex is just as difficult, or
even more impossible, to admit. They had no choices, I am sure, they would
argue. But that is precisely, I believe, Oshima’s point in this brave motion
picture, in which love often is transformed into violence, insanity briefly
reformed by reaches between the gaps of misunderstanding and hate.
Los Angeles, June 21, 2008
Reprinted from Nth Position (July 2013).
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