by Douglas
Messerli
Nagisa Ōshima (screenplay, based
on Shinsengumi Keppūroku by Ryōtarō Shiba), Nagisa Ōshima (director) 御法度
(Gohatto) (Taboo) / 1999
The
great Japanese director Nagisa Ōshima’s last film, Gohatto
is a complex and ambigious film that might, upon first viewing, be
difficult for Hollywood-bred audiences. I suggest for US audiences originally
coming to this film, that they see the work’s beautiful hero, Kanō Sōzaburō (Ryuhei
Matsuda) to be a bit like Herman Melville’s character Billy Budd—without all
the Christian trappings.
Clearly, Sōzaburō (I use Kanō’s first name throughout
to give him equal weight to the HMS Bellipotent crew’s beloved Billy) is
no stand-in for Christ. He has willingly joined the Japanese Shinsengumi, the
elite samurai order of the mid-nineteenth century, specifically, as he puts it,
“to have the right to kill.” Unlike Billy, this stunningly beautiful young man
has not been stolen, against his will, from another merchant ship, but has
willingly joined up for the promised sword-play. And kill he does, perhaps
as many as three times in a film wherein the other warriors see no violence
whatsoever.
Finally, if Sōzaburō is tied to any ineffable
beings, it is to the world of the ugetsu, the
world of the rain and the moon or, more explicitly, to the world of ghosts, not
to the human incarnation of the son of God.
Yet, much like Billy this 18-year-old
samurai, once permitted “on board” at the samurai academy, certainly sets the
male hearts aflutter. Chuck Stephens, writing in Film Comment described
the new recruit as “some sort of teenage daydream: a pale and lethal alien from
the glitter side of the moon.” And much like Melville’s young hero, we know almost
from the beginning that all will not end well.
Melville, writing for a late 19th
century American audience could not openly express whether Billy actually gave
into his various sailor-mates’ desires and lusts, but for the all-male samurai
homosexuality was the highest level of love, and Ōshima leaves no question
about the prurient interests of Sōzaburō’s barrack mates and his superiors.
From the very first moment that he watches the beautiful boy in a mock fight
against Captain Okita Sōji (Shinji Takeda),Vice-Commander Hijikata Toshizō
(renowned actor Takeshi Kitano), the Captain Vere of this story, suddenly opens
up his usually inexpressive face to a slight grin as he begins to talk of those
who are “inclined,” evidently including himself; and even if he does not
actively seek out sex with the bishonen (the “beautiful boy”), he
watches over him as carefully as a mother hen would care for her new-born chick,
assigning him as his own Aide, while placing another promising recruit, Hyōzō
Tashiro (Tadanobu Asano) to Okita’s First Unit.
Stephens quotes writer Ian Buruma, referring,
in turn, to yet another commentator Nosaka Akiyuki: “a true bishonen has
to have something sinister about him. The vision of pure youth, because of its
fragility perhaps, reminds one of impermanence, thus of death. In fact, youth
is beautiful precisely because it is so short-lived. The cult of cherry
blossoms, which only last about a week in Japan, is the same as the worship of
the bishonen, and the two are often compared. Taken one small step
further [the cult of the bishonen] is the cult of death.”
And Stephens himself, in his terribly
insightful if inconclusive essay, notes the trajectory of this film: “Delicious
in design, delirious with detail, Gohatto was photographed in and around
ancient temples in Kyoto. Its mysterious appeal is poly-demographic: anime
admirers, romance aficionados, fans of Mishima and Hana-bi, young lovers on a
date—this is the Ōshima film for you.”
We get a scene out of Mishima almost
immediately in this work. In part to test him his willingness to accept death, Hijikata
immediately assigns him the beheading of a fellow samurai who has been caught
borrowing money. If the samurai are permissive regarding male on male sexual
activity, their codes are highly strict regarding everything else, and anyone
who is caught violating the code must disembowel himself. The beheading
evidently reveals that the swordsman is only “suspected” of having violated
that code.
Just as Sōzaburō has shown his skill as a
swordsman a day earlier, he severs the head with simple aplomb after uttering
the traditional phrase before the kill, “Forgive me.”
Already Tashiro has attempted to claim Sōzaburō as his lover, while the beauty has pretended
to sleep; and soon after he visits the bishonen’s sleeping mat yet
again, prepared to spend the night. Yet as he turns the boy over for a kiss, Sōzaburō
puts a small knife to Tashiro’s neck (later, we discover the knife has been stolen
from the would-be assailant himself), making it clear that he desires no
lovemaking with the lusting swordsman.
Soon after, however, when Hijikata pairs
up the two for a fight, the perceived better swordsman Sōzaburō succumbs to Tashiro,
which seemingly proves to the Vice-Commander that the two have now sexually
entwined, the rumor of which quickly spreads around the barracks. The narrator,
who intrudes from time to time throughout the film, makes a point that much in
this all-male world is based on just such rumors.
It is not that Sōzaburō is disinclined
for male sex. When Commander Kondö is called to Hiroshima, Hijikata is put in
charge of the official residence, and moves his best men, including Sōzaburō,
to the Commander’s far more ornate palace. Nearby, wined and dined by an older
samurai, Tojiro Yuzawa (Tomorowo Taguchi), Sōzaburō
seemingly sexually succumbs to the man’s passion twice, begging him only not to
tell Tashiro about the events.
To help mitigate further advances, Hijikata insists that his trusted Inspector, Sergeant
Yamazaki (Masa Tomiizu) take the beautiful boy to a geisha house, since Sōzaburō is still a virgin when it comes to women.
Yamazaki carefully arranges everything, including choosing the establishment’s
youngest and most beautiful woman. Three times after the sergeant asks the boy
to accompany him to the inn, the bishnnen refuses, finally, on the
fourth try, accepts. The sergeant, in another effort to enforce normalcy, he
suggests that the boy is now old enough to cut his chonmage, the long
ponytail that accentuates his youth. But Sōzaburō refuses, declaring that he has made a
“vow.” To whom and why we cannot imagine. Surely not to the sexually rejected
Tashiro; or has he been rejected, we must ask.
Later Yamazaki is himself attacked back
in quarters, but is able to scare the would-be killer away. The knife he finds
nearby seemingly belongs to Tashiro.
To solve the lustmord that is
quickly escalating the Commander orders the beautiful boy to kill his presumed
lover, Tashiro. He also orders Hijikata and Okita, to whose divisions Sōzaburō and Tashiro had been assigned, to hide a short
distance from the encounter to observe the execution without intruding. Or is
it an “execution” and simply not another attempt for their superiors to prove
which of the two was truly the superior swordsman.
In the moonlit quite ethereal landscape—created
by an artificial backdrop— all has become ambiguous, and Okita’s questions
further confuse us as he challenges Hijikata himself about his relationship
with the bishonen. Yamazaki is offended. But Okita continues, describing
a long ugetsu tale he has read about a soldier taking an enemy soldier he
has maimed in combat into his home in order to nurse him to health. Gradually,
the two become friends and find themselves growing even closer before one of
them is forced to kill himself for having fallen in love.
Troubled by all this discussion of male
love, Hijikata temporarily turns the table, so to speak, wondering why Okita
has been so observant of his and others’ reactions to the boy and querying his
interest in such ugetsu stories.
Okita declares not only is he “not inclined”
but, in a kind of early homophobia we now might equate to being closeted, tells
Hijikata that he hates both of the young recruits. He reads the ghost stories
only for their beauty of their structures, not for their content.
Sōzaburō and Tashiro approach one
another, the younger boy claiming that Tashiro has killed two men over his love
for him. Tashiro quickly rejects the charge, claiming that he knows that Sōzaburō
has long ago stolen his knife. As the two swordsmen begin to fight, it becomes
apparent that indeed Tashiro is the superior of the two, at one point towering
over his would-be lover who cries out “Forgive me.”
Both observers lament Tashiro’s death,
recognizing that Sōzaburō has been forced to kill
the other simply based on the words and views of those around him. In the brief
flashes of light on the dark landscape, however, we can only note that Okita
too wears his hair in a mage. Was Sōzaburō’s vow made directly or silently
to him?
If nothing else we now do suddenly
recognize our John Claggart, the not unattractive man who, nonetheless, as Melville
writes, seemed “defective or abnormal in the constitution,” possessing a “natural
depravity.” As the story asserts, Claggart more than anything was controlled by
“envy” for Billy’s “significant personal beauty,” along with his innocence and
general popularity.
As Sōzaburō, a winner who has lost the
man who most loved him, moves off down a road, Okita tells Hihikata that he has
something he has forgotten to do, and moves in the direction of that the killer
has taken. Alone, Hijikata suddenly comes to the perception, shouting in the
direction in which Okita has now moved: “ Destroy him. If you did not love Sōzaburō,
Sōzaburō
loved you.”
In the far distance we hear a scream as
Okita kills the boy.
A bit like Lear, Hijikata suddenly screams
out in a rage: "Sozaburo was too beautiful. Men took advantage of him. He
was possessed by evil." And with that, the Vice-Commander takes up his own
sword, cutting down several branches of the nearby cherry tree, ending the
tragedy into which we have just awakened.
Los
Angeles, August 4, 2020
Reprinted
from World Cinema Review (August 2020).
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