The Japanese actors are not helped by being made to speak English. The comparisons with the West are continuous, and mostly and deliberately unflattering. And by showing acts of sadism by the Japanese, he was challenging the collective, selective amnesia that had settled on his nation. With the portrayal of ritual suicide as brutal and botched, Oshima was questioning the notion of a beautiful death. With Captain Yonoi’s obsessive love for Bowie, Oshima was questioning Japanese ideals of soldiering and masculinity. To Western eyes, Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence might seem like a Christmas tearjerker – but Oshima was challenging his country. But most importantly, he was anti-establishment. He made his name in part through pink films – Japan’s huge and surprisingly artistic softcore porn industry. He’s been called the Japanese Godard, concerned as his films are with politics, sex, youth and experimentalism. At the time of this film, he was the best-known of the Japanese New Wave. Here it pays to know something about Oshima. Which is why the hue of the film changes so suddenly when you see the name of the director. It feels like a stock bit of Western storytelling: not exactly racist, but not too subtle or balanced either. Bowie is an eccentric hero, but certainly a hero – and clearly where our sympathies are meant to lie. The film lionises the West and, at times, it demonises the East. But the plot essentially revolves around the escalating tensions between the prisoners and their guards: the noble, stoic Brits and the cruel, code-bound Japanese. The iconic faces make it hard to suspend disbelief.
Those whisky adverts with Bill Murray in Lost in Translation? Kitano does those in real life. And the comedian and film-maker Takeshi Kitano is one of the most well-known faces in Japan. Ryuichi Sakamoto is a Japanese rockstar who kept the eye-liner and contouring for the role.
#RYUICHI SAKAMOTO MERRY CHRISTMAS MR. LAWRENCE SKIN#
This is a ‘Let’s Dance’-era Bowie, with sharp teeth, tanned skin and peroxide hair. The roster of celebrities has a strange effect on everything.
He spars with Kitano, who plays a sort of Japanese Falstaff, a violent boozehound prone to flares of largesse. Then there’s Lawrence, sensitive and bilingual, constantly shuttling between the two cultures and trying to translate their values. And as the plot develops, they pull him apart. He’s obsessed with two things: bushido and Bowie. Captain Yonoi, the camp’s commandant, is from the warrior class. And each of these struggles is embodied in the battle of wills of two pairs of officers: Jack Celliers (Bowie) and Captain Yonoi (Ryuichi Sakamoto) and John Lawrence (Tom Conti) and Sergeant Hara (Kitano).īowie plays an upper-crust enigma, a paratrooper who defies authority in typically unorthodox ways like eating flowers and leading sing-a-longs. East versus West, patriotism versus pragmatism, guilt versus shame. It’s a story about forgiveness and understanding between cultures. It’s a story about East-West relations that plays out in the microcosm of a Japanese PoW camp in Java. At heart the film seems sweetly, naively simple.
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