Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: 10/13/17

A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Friday, October 13, 2017

Three Resurrected Drunkards (Nagisa Oshima, 1968)

Kazuhiko Kato, Osamu Kitayama, and Norihiko Hashida in Three Resurrected Drunkards

Beanpole: Kazuhiko Kato
The Small One: Osamu Kitayama
The Smallest One: Norihiko Hashida
I Chong-il: Kei Sato
Kim Fwa: Cha Dei-dang
The Middle-aged Man: Fumio Watanabe
The Young Woman: Mako Midori

Director: Nagisa Oshima
Screenplay: Masao Adachi, Mamoru Sasaki, Tsutomu Tamura, Nagisa Oshima
Cinematography: Yasuhiro Yoshioka
Film editing: Keiichi Uraoka
Music: Hikaru Hayashi

Nagisa Oshima's attempts to unsettle his audiences usually took the form of serious explorations of social dysfunction like Cruel Story of Youth (1960), Boy (1969), and The Ceremony (1971) or sexually provocative films like In the Realm of the Senses (1976), but Three Resurrected Drunkards plays more like A Hard Day's Night (Richard Lester, 1964) than any of those often grim and brutal excursions into the dark side of contemporary Japanese life. It begins with three young men larking about at the beach, accompanied by a giddy Japanese pop song. When their clothes are stolen and replaced with others, the film goes off into a series of mostly comic mishaps. But there's a dark side to their larking about from the beginning: One of their gags is an attempt to restage the Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph by Eddie Adams of a South Vietnam general pointing a gun at the head of a grimacing Viet Cong prisoner. They take turns playing the general and the victim as the third critiques the grimace on the face of the one playing the victim. It turns out that the clothes thieves are South Koreans who are trying to sneak into Japan to avoid military service in Vietnam. The Koreans have a gun, with which they threaten the three young Japanese. Along the way, they also get involved with a young woman and an abusive older man who may or may not be her husband. At one point, the film simply stops and starts over at the beginning, but this time the characters know what happened in the first part and are able to change things around. It's all a fascinating blend of rock movie high jinks and serious social commentary: Oshima is satirizing the Japanese prejudice against Koreans, among other things. Some of the satire is lost on contemporary audiences, especially in the West, but Three Resurrected Drunkards is a fascinating glimpse into its director's imagination and political indignation.