Oshima, Fifth Encounter, Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence

(video by kasoooo)

Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence, made by Oshima in 1983. This time I thought immediately at D. H. Lawrence. Not so much at his famous Lady Chatterley's Lover: the movie reminds you rather of The Prussian Officer.

On the other hand Mishima (with his biography and all controversies) comes to mind as you follow one of the main personages (Captain Yonoi).

Java island, 1943: a Japanese camp of British prisoners. Besides the inherent harshness in such a place, the brutal clash of two very distant cultures; the other one is more than an enemy: an incomprehensible alien.

The movie is based on a book written by Sir Laurens van der Post, a British officer who was prisoner in the camp. So it's a Japanese director making the film to understand the mind of a British author who wrote his book to understand, among other things, the Japanese mind: Oshima is trying to understand the responsibility of his nation in the war, as viewed through the eyes of the enemy.

A heavy homoerotic suggestion passes throughout this movie: draped in brutality, fight for male domination or just for survival, need of affection, repressed desires.

To treat seriously such a theme one has to be very honest, which is always difficult. Beyond courage and openness: honesty. For an artist is to imagine himself in each personage he is talking about and go down to total identification: it's Flaubert in his Madame Bovary, c'est moi! And when one has arrived down there, then it's to look inside and understand the hidden demon.

It starts with the punishment of a guard who has made sex to one prisoner. The Japanese rules of discipline are strict: the raper must commit ritual suicide! The prisoner won't survive either: beyond obvious humiliation, he had found in the rape a proof of desperate affection.

This first episode is only setting the parameters. The main actors of the drama are other guys: the Mediator, the Jerk, the Sergeant, the Hero, the Samurai.

The Mediator is Colonel John Lawrence (Tom Conti): he has spent several years before the war in Tokyo, getting some knowledge of Japanese language and culture; more than that, he understands the vital importance of compromise. It is immensely difficult: sometimes Lawrence has more problems with his own comrades; there is among them the Jerk, a so-called British commander of the prisoners (the guy who happens to be the highest in rank, without any real authority of course). This guy is stupidly arrogant and makes always things worse. By the way, it is played by a very decent actor, Jack Thompson :)

Lawrence works much better with the Sergeant: the chief guard. Sergeant Hara (Takeshi Kitano) is brutal, moody and very effective. He knows that for keeping discipline he has to be tough, and he is. In other conditions he would have been a good husband and father, managing his farm; the war made him the chief guard of the prisoner camp and he is just doing his job.

The Samurai is Captain Yonoi (Ryuichi Sakamoto) the commander of the camp: a young aristocrat obsessed with his system of values; military honor, discipline, self sacrifice, abnegation. Is it not something deeper in him? Something he is trying to escape from, something he is ashamed of? Something he does not have the courage to acknowledge? The arrival of a new prisoner unleashes the demon.

This new prisoner is the Hero: Major Jack Straffer Celliers (David Bowie) is different from Lawrence. He is not a reasonable guy searching the compromise. By the contrary, he volunteered in the war and fought in guerrilla missions: looking always for trouble, for punishment, for death.

A male of a strange beauty, blond, with blue eyes, and an impossible smile: seductive while distant. Should we wonder that Captain Yonoi finds an ever growing attraction for the stranger? Why is that? Is it because Celliers is unquestionably a hero? A prototype for Yonoi's system of samurai values? Well, it could be, but Celliers is the enemy! Does this detail increase the attraction Yonoi is feeling? Maybe. This attraction becomes physically and mentally intolerable for Yonoi, who finds desperately an answer: the stranger is an alien god! Only a god can be so beautiful, so heroic, and, well, so strange.

A blond god, with blue eyes, who came from the remote Albion to torment Captain Yonoi?

Actually Celliers himself is fighting with his own demons: long time ago, in remote childhood, he did not protect his younger brother who was kind of an androgyn and thus the target of cruel jokes from other kids. Years had passed, Celliers had become a successful lawyer; women were finding him very handsome, only he was not interested in them. He felt the arrival of war as the long sought occasion to free from his own obsessions.

Eventually Celiers would make the supreme gesture to get punished: he would kiss Yonoi in front of everybody, so he would be condemned to death and buried alive; relieve would come at last, with his agony ... while Yonoi would approach him and cut a lock from his blond hair - to bury it later in the familial shrine:

In the Spring,
Obeying the August spirits
I went to fight the enemy.

In the Fall,
Returning I beg the spirits,
To receive also the enemy.

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Is it a movie about our hidden demons? No, it's rather about our frailty. And about hidden moments of intense humanity: after some years, Sergeant Hara would be put to death as a war criminal; Lawrence would visit him in prison - the British had once been sentenced to death himself, and saved by Hara, in a moment of drunkenness, You know who is Father Christmas? I am, and I forgive you. Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence, Merry Christmas!



(Japanese New Wave)