More than Mr. Lawrence: TIFF Nagisa Oshima retrospective encompasses '60s zeitgeist of sex, politics and crime
BY LIAM LACEY
The Japanese director, Nagisa Oshima - subject of the currently-running TIFF Bell Lightbox retrospective, In The Realm of Oshima: The Best of Japanese Master Nagisa Oshima - combines those evergreen ‘60s themes of sex and anti-authoritarian politics in thrillingly cerebral and confrontational films.
Oshima (1930-2013) is best known for two provocative late-career international hits. One was Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence (1983) starring David Bowie as a Japanese prisoner of war, and the other was the 1976 art-house shocker about murder and castration, In The Realm of the Senses..
Yusuke Kawazu and Miyuki Kuwano in Oshima’s Cruel Story of Youth
Neither of those suggest the impact of his radical output in the 1960s, when he released 19 films (out of a career total of 24) from 1959-1972, an output on par with that of France’s Jean-Luc Godard, to whom Oshima was often compared. The current retrospective includes 11 features (three from 1960 alone) and is a pared-down version of a larger retrospective programmer James Quandt assembled in 2008.
That means we miss one of the other late films, Max, Mon Amour, a French film in which Charlotte Rampling falls in love with a chimp. Two films, Boy (1968) and In The Realm of the Senses, have already been screened.
The final nine are as follows:
Sat. Nov. 16. Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence (1983). Very much an East-West coproduction, including sometimes contrasting acting styles, Mr. Lawrence was based on Sir Laurens van der Post’s memoirs in a WWII Japanese prisoner-of-war camp in Java. The “Mr. Lawrence” of the title refers to Tom Conti’s character, the observer of the story. Kieran Grant, TIFF’s publications editor and a former rock critic, will talk about the cinema careers of the two rock stars.
Sun. Nov. 17 and Mon. Nov. 18: Cruel Story of Youth (1960) and The Sun’s Burial (1960). These two stories of juvenile crime kickstarted Oshima’s career. Cruel Story of Youth is sort of the Japanese answer to Rebel without a Cause or Godard’s Breathless. It follows the relationship between a teenaged girl and a small-time gangster, who persuades her to put older men in compromising positions to extort money from them. The Sun’s Burial, is set in Kamagasaki, a slum of Osaka, in a world of homeless war veterans, human trafficking and illegal blood sales. The film focuses on Takeshi, a teen gang member, and Hanako, an ambitious prostitute who sells blood donations to a cosmetics company.
Nov. 19. Night and Fog in Japan (1960). Wedding speeches for a couple of former student radicals turn into a series of flashbacks and rumination on a decade of Japanese leftist radicalism, the betrayal of Communism, and protests against the AMPO treaty (the US-Japan mutual defense pact). Three days after it was released, the film was abruptly pulled by the studio in the wake of the assassination of a Japanese Socialist politician.
Nov. 21. The Ceremony (1971) Heralded as Oshima’s most ambitious work, Ceremony takes the “dysfunctional family” cliché taken to extremes – incest, suicide, weddings, funerals over decades - as a metaphor of Japan torn between the feudal past and the present.
Nov. 23. Violence At Noon (1966). The story of a serial murderer/rapist and the women who protect him. It cuts from a police investigation to flashbacks in a wildly prismatic style exploring societal and personal madness.
Nov. 30. Death By Hanging (1968). Based on the true story of a young Korean in Japan who raped and murdered two girls, and was sentenced to death. In Oshima’s version, the hanging fails, the Korean develops amnesia, and a trial ensues to remind him of his guilt so as to hang him once again. The film swings from caustic satire of Japanese xenophobia into surrealism.
Dec. 4. The Man Who Left His Will on Film (1970). A student, part of a radical film collective, jumps off a rooftop as he is being chased by police. His friend believes that the death was a suicide and that the reasons will be apparent from the film camera. Obsessed with the friend’s life, he begins to appropriate it as his own.
Dec. 11. Pleasures of the Flesh (1965). A man who has committed murder, is blackmailed into babysitting a suitcase full of embezzled money. But, fully expecting to die at the end of the year, he decides to spend it on an erotic blowout.
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