Funeral Parade of Roses (1969, Toshio Matsumoto)

Pîtâ in Funeral Parade of Roses

Eddie: Pîtâ
Leda: Osamu Ogasawara
Gonda: Yoshio Tsuchiya
Guevara: Toyosaburo Uchiyama
Tony: Don Madrid
Eddie's Mother: Emiko Azuma
Jimi: Yoshimi Jo
Juju: Koichi Nakamura
Greco: Flamenco Umeji
Mari: Saako Oota
Nora: Taro Manji
Philosopher: Mikio Shibayama
Sabu: Wataru Hikonagi
Piro: Fuchisumi Gomi
Okei: Chieko Kobayashi
Radon: Yo Sato
Humpback: Keiichi Takanaga

Director: Toshio Matsumoto
Screenplay: Toshio Matsumoto
Cinematography: Tatsuo Suzuki
Art direction: Setsu Asakura
Film editing: Toshie Iwasa
Music: Joji Yuasa

Toshio Matsumoto's Funeral Parade of Roses both participates in and parodies the late-1960s avant-garde "underground" film movement, with its reliance on eccentric cuts and random inserts. There's a scene in which the filmmakers are shooting a badly tuned television set, and keep fiddling with the set to get the kind of distorted image they want. And at one point someone quotes the avant-garde filmmaker Jonas Mekas -- and then gets his name wrong, calling him "Menas Jokas." Matsumoto's film keeps the viewer off-balance at all times, moving in and out of what we take to be "reality" to expose that it's all moviemaking. There is, for example, a scene in which the cross-dressing protagonist, Eddie, and a black man, Tony, seem to be having sex, with lots of pornographic gasping and facial contortions. But then the camera angle shifts and we see that there's a camera crew surrounding the bed where Tony is propped up by himself on the headboard while the camera is focused on the face of Eddie, simulating ecstasy. Even the main story of the film gets its distancing when we cut to the actor who plays Eddie, Pîtâ (or Peter, as the English language screen credits have it), being interviewed about the role he's playing. It's much like his own life, he says, except for the incest part. At this point in the film, we don't know about the incest part, which precipitates the crisis in Eddie's life. Suffice it to say that Matsumoto based a large part of the film on Oedipus Rex. The central story deals with the rivalry between Eddie and Leda, the "Madame" of a club that caters to salarymen who want to sleep with gei boi, for the affections of Gonda, a man who turns out to have more significance in Eddie's life than is at first apparent. There are some longueurs in Matsumoto's film, mostly having to do with the avant-garde sequences but also with a too-long drugged-out orgy scene. (Other people's orgies are invariably boring.) But there are some genuine shocks and some real emotion in the film, and the performance by Pîtâ -- best known as the androgynous Kyoami, the analogue to the Fool in Ran (1985), Akira Kurosawa's reworking of King Lear -- is outstanding.

The Funeral (Juzo Itami, 1985)

Nobuko Miyamoto and Tsutomu Yamazaki in The Funeral

Wabisuki Inoue: Tsutomu Yamazai
Chizuko Amamiya: Nobuko Miyamoto
Kikue Amamiya: Kin Sugai
Shokichi Amamiya: Hideji Otaki
Shinkichi Amamiya: Kiminobu Okumura
Shokichi's wife: Hiroko Futaba
Priest: Chishu Ryu

Director: Juzo Itami
Screenplay: Juzo Itami
Cinematography: Yonezo Maeda
Art direction: Hiroshi Tokuda
Film editing: Akira Suzuki
Music: Joji Yuasa

The Funeral has been compared to the films of Luis Buñuel for its satiric, sometimes almost surreal portrait of a bourgeois Japanese family, and to the Jean Renoir of A Day in the Country (1936) and  The Rules of the Game (1939) and for its amused look at people tempted by an unusual situation to cast off conventional behavior. But do I also detect something of an homage to Yasujirio Ozu? There's a wonderful cameo by Ozu's favorite actor, Chishu Ryu, as the Rolls-Royce-driving priest, of course, but there's also something about the quiet, almost meditative ending, after the turmoil of the arrival of the mourners, the wake, and the funeral itself, when Kikue Amamiya, the widow, gives her heartfelt eulogy to her husband. Until this point, Kikue has hardly shed a tear while going on with the endless preparations and the inevitable unexpected screwups. But mostly, it's a Juzo Itami film, not so raucous as Tampopo (1985), but as witty in its treatment of human obsessions. In this case, it's the obsession with doing things right, especially on the part of Wabisuki, the son-in-law of the deceased, who with his wife, Chizuko, wants to follow Japanese tradition to the letter, even though both of them are very modernized people. Both are actors, whom we first see filming a TV commercial, and they want to get things staged just right. But since neither has experienced a traditional Japanese funeral, they resort to watching a video called The ABCs of the Funeral, which explains all the elaborate protocol involved. Inevitably, things get more complicated, particularly when Wabisuki's mistress shows up, gets drunk, and drags him into the bushes for sex. There's also the wake, where there's more drinking and a problem of getting the inebriated guests to go home, most of which is shown in a wonderful long take in which we watch outside the windows of the several rooms where guests are being urged to leave. Even the cremation takes a macabre-funny turn when the oven attendant invites the mourners backstage, as it were, to discourse on the difficulties of turning a corpse to ashes. The Funeral is a bit overlong, but it has heart to compensate for its bite.

Pleasures of the Flesh (Nagisa Oshima, 1965)

Mariko Kaga in Pleasures of the Flesh

Atsushi Wakazaka: Katsuo Nakamura
Shoko: Mariko Kaga
Hitomi: Yumiko Nagawa
Shizuko: Masako Yagi
Mari: Toshiko Higuchi
Keiko: Hiroko Shimizu
Hayami: Shoichi Ozawa
Police Inspector: Kei Sato
Sakurai: Rokko Toura
Gang Member: Fumio Watanabe
Egi: Hosei Kamatsu
Mari's Pimp: Akiji Kobayashi

Director: Nagisa Oshima
Screenplay: Nagisa Oshima
Based on a novel by Futaro Yamada
Cinematography: Akira Takada
Art direction: Yasutaro Kon
Music: Joji Yuasa

With a burst of bluesy music, Pleasures of the Flesh starts out like a film noir, and the plot setup follows suit. The young tutor to a pretty teenager kills a man who has molested her, but the act has been witnessed by a man who has embezzled funds from his place of work. In an attempt to blackmail the tutor, the embezzler says he won't tell the police if the young man will hide 30 million yen of the loot. The embezzler expects to be arrested, he says, but he'll return for the money after serving his prison sentence. If the tutor has spent any of it, he'll tell the police about the murder. The tutor reluctantly agrees, but then the plot not unexpectedly begins to tangle. The tutor, Atsushi, is in love with the teenager, Shoko, but too poor to win her parents' approval. He's so devastated when she marries that he begins to lose his mind. The embezzler has in fact gone to prison, and Atsushi decides to live it up on the 30 million yen, then kill himself when the embezzler has served his term. And so begins a series of flings with four women, each of whom he pays to live with him. There's a showgirl with a gangster boyfriend, a married woman whose husband is desperately in debt, a doctor who insists on remaining a virgin, and a mute prostitute with a thuggish pimp. None of these attempts to wallow in the titular pleasures of the flesh ends well, and then, just as Atsushi spends the last of the money, he learns that the embezzler has died in prison. As if that outcome weren't ironic enough, the embezzler also told a fellow inmate about the 30 million yen he had stashed with Atsushi and when he's released he comes in search of the money. It's a moral tale straight out of Boccaccio or Chaucer, but writer-director Nagisa Oshima is faced with modernizing it and doesn't quite succeed. There's a bit too much fancy camerawork as Oshima interpolates Atsushi's obsessive visions of Shoko and paranoid ones of the embezzler into the narrative. The moral tale still feels heavyhanded. But Pleasures of the Flesh is the work of a major filmmaker at the outset of his career, and as such rewards watching.