We recall the image; after 40 years, some remain haunted by it. At the time, it shattered us—and, as a U.S. American, it disgusted me that my nation supported the one who was doing the shooting. During the Vietnam War, in the Tet Offensive, on a street in Saigon, the South Vietnamese national police chief, Gen. Nguyen Ngoc Loan, aimed his service pistol, point-blank, at the right temple of his bound, upright, frantically crying prisoner, a suspected Viet Cong officer, and fired. Nagisa Oshima’s Kaette kita yopparai brilliantly uses this recent horrific event, this burst of cold-bloodedness, as the springboard for satirical comedy. On a beach, three young Japanese guys—students on vacation—play at re-enacting the event; first, one of them uses his hand to pretend shooting another, but, eventually, two of them each has a pretend-pistol at either temple of the third frolicker. By film’s end, these play-executions haunt the wartime fate of the three boys.
Oshima addresses the extent to which the Japanese feel ethnically superior to all others, in this case, specifically, Koreans. Two Korean soldiers have gone AWOL. These illegal aliens who want to become Japanese exchange their garb for that of two of the kids, who have peeled their clothes for a swim in the sea. Oshima achieves elegant visual comedy here: we see the boys’ clothes on the beach and hands, from underneath the sand, reaching up to appropriate them, zwooping them down, out of sight, and depositing the Korean clothes on the sand. All this is a rare instance where color doesn’t “slow down” comedy.
Unfortunately, Japanese authorities now mistake the students for Koreans, and misadventures ensue. Add to this a rearranged chronology that reflects deftly onto Japanese bigotry against Koreans the charge of irrationality.
Posts Tagged ‘Oshima’
THREE RESURRECTED DRUNKARDS (Nagisa Oshima, 1968)
October 6, 2010MERRY CHRISTMAS[,] MR. LAWRENCE (Nagisa Oshima, 1983)
September 30, 2010Nagisa Oshima, surpassed in Japanese cinema only by Yasujiro Ozu, tends to make movies that are exceptionally harsh and violent; even so, one is not prepared for the cruelty on display in Merry Christmas[,] Mr. Lawrence, Oshima’s adaptation of Afrikaner novelist Laurens Van der Post’s The Seed and the Sower, about cultural and other collisions between Japanese and captured British soldiers in a prison camp during World War II. Entirely fitting, given this, is that Maj. Jack Celliers—he shares initials with Stephen Crane’s Jim Conklin and the Apostles’ Jesus Christ—ends up capitally punished in a way that recalls Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí’s Un chien andalou (1928). The film, almost entirely in English, won Oshima three prizes at the Mainichi Film Concours: best film, direction, screenplay.
It is indeed sufficiently stringent to undo the impression left by Steven Spielberg’s moronic Empire of the Sun (1987), from J.G. Ballard’s 1984 autobiographical novel, that life in such a camp wasn’t a dastardly experience. On the other hand, Oshima succeeds in keeping the film from becoming sadistic, a catalog of horrors, like Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975), which too easily rationalizes its own sadistic streak by taking strident aim at Nazi torture techniques. On the other other hand, Oshima’s film comes close, for instance, when a soldier suffocates, after biting his tongue, because forced to watch the execution of his gay lover. The former is Dutch, the latter, Korean; but this division is as irrelevant as whether either man is (outside the crucible of war and internment) homosexual. The point is this: whatever they are or aren’t, they are equally human in either case. Oshima would deal with the relationship between homosexuality and military environment with greater clarity and wit in Taboo (1999).
Apart from the theme of betrayal and the fact that Jack’s (whipped) back also figures prominently, I don’t know what to make of haunted Jack’s memories of having betrayed his humpbacked younger brother in childhood. Did any such brother exist? Are both brothers the same character, interacting imaginatively across different (st)ages of life? If the latter is the case, then the other’s stopping singing provides an index of Jack’s torment from the inside out.
This uneven film by Oshima is certainly not one of his masterpieces. But it is bold, fascinating, hard to let go.
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A TREATISE ON JAPANESE BAWDY SONGS (Nagisa Oshima, 1967)
August 28, 2010Songs: their singing both expresses and partially numbs bad feelings. This paradox of humanity correlates to the appearance of Nagisa Oshima’s brilliant, largely improvised Nihon shunka-kô, sometimes translated as Sing a Song of Sex, where color often translates into black and white, in particular, a palette of soft, melancholy grays. Uttered on a college campus by an older student, here is the signature verbal encapsulation of a film which falls short of being a masterpiece perhaps only for want of formal rigor: “I feel sorry for [young people]. No politics, no panties, no oppression.” The one hope is a reigning misery in the world: the Vietnam War. Ironically, its horror provides an opportunity for youth, by their protest, to score a shot for the angels and to redeem themselves from Japanese complacency and, earlier, fascist criminality. However else it may seem, this film is all about hope.
Clearly, Oshima’s film, like the way we process life, proceeds by paradox and irony. We require the worst of human experience to ensure the best of human experience. War may be necessary for the idea of peace to exist; without the idea, whatever peace exists may be illusory.
Four men—postwar individuals who might also be considered a combinate protagonist, hence, a reflection of prewar and wartime Japan—are the main male characters. They are headed to their own past, which the present turns into. Here, they are walking towards the camera in a field; with a cut, they are walking away from the camera in the same field. Everyone should have the experience I had: I lost the cut in the blink of an eye. The result was magical and haunting.
Future writer-director (and future suicide) Juzo Itami plays one of the men.
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PLEASURES OF THE FLESH (Nagisa Oshima, 1965)
August 22, 2010What a striking image: in deep darkness, a streak of light that materializes into a young bride in her wedding gown diagonally fleeing across the screen. Apart from the dreamlike quality of the image itself, three things about writer-director Nagisa Oshima’s Etsuraku, adapted from Futaro Yamada’s 1962 novel Kan no Naka no Etsuraku, suggest we have been plunged into someone’s dream: the interiority projected by the protagonist’s recurrent voiceover; the stretch of negative space in numerous compositions that strengthen the impression of this interiority; the scarcely believable, convoluted and complicated plot. Isn’t Atsushi Wakizaka, the poor boy who fell in love with the rich girl he once tutored, who is now marrying according to her station, dreaming everything we see, including the murder he committed onboard a train to secure the girl’s honor and the fortune he fell into, allowing him a series of lovers to supplant his heart’s desire?
Regardless of how dreamily or literally one processes this relatively weak film by one of Japan’s three or four greatest filmmakers, the major themes emerge with almost alarming, feverish clarity: the role of money, status and power in postwar Japanese society. Even lesser Oshima tackles serious matter. As Wakizaka offers to keep one woman after another by dint of his serendipitous wealth (someone else’s embezzled funds), it is poignant to hear one of them muse that she could devote herself to research if only her living expenses were taken care of. Oshima takes swipes at capitalism with the best of them.
Anchoring the film is its diminutive star, Katsuo Nakamura, whose lead performance layers humiliations and imaginative compensations: a desperate spiraling out in an ultimately inescapable dead-end.
At one point Joji Yuasa’s main musical theme, a parody of delirious Hollywood schmaltz, stops mid-note!
THE CATCH (Nagisa Oshima, 1961)
September 10, 2011Towards the end of the Second World War, a downed U.S. pilot is captured and imprisoned by rural Japanese villagers, who await official instructions as to how to proceed with their “catch.” The villagers constantly refer to the soldier, who is black, as “the nigger,” and the fascination he draws—although there are those who are hostile from the start—quickly devolves into wider, and deeper, anger and contempt. The silent prisoner becomes a touchstone for tensions and discordance among the villagers, and a convenient scapegoat—an ultimate means of denying responsibility for all manner of crimes, including the war itself. Word comes of the death of a soldier from their village. The prisoner is blamed for this and, also, the death of a village child. The villagers murder the innocent soldier and rehearse the lies they will tell to cover up their crimes. They feel betrayed by the Emperor when word arrives that the war recently ended in defeat for Japan.
Based on a novella by Oe Kenzaburo, Shiiku is one of Nagisa Oshima’s most corrosive and brilliant works, its widescreen black-and-white images, including delicately choreographed long-shots, an index of the villagers’ “togetherness” barely concealing their antagonisms toward each other and, of course, to the rest of the world. The scene of the prisoner’s burial astounds: over a gaping hole in the earth, hands of villagers, including those of children, reaching into the frame, at least one with rapidly flexing fingers, forming a sacred circle predicting remembrance. The village crimes, however, are not yet finished, and only one lone “Ishmael,” a teenaged boy, Japan’s haunted future, may tell the tale.
Grim and relentless, Shiiku exposes Japanese xenophobia, hypocrisy and denial-tendencies, and even implicitly opposes the continuation of these through Japan’s schooling of its children.
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