Year: 1969
Director: Toshio Matsumoto
Screenplay: Toshio Matsumoto
Starring: Peter (Shinnosuke Ikehata), Osamu Ogasawara, Yoshio Tsuchiya, Emiko Azuma
Running Time: 105 minutes
Genre: Drama
Eddie (Peter), a young transgender woman living in Tokyo, works in a gay bar called the Genet, where she is having a relationship with the bar's owner (Tsuchiya), who is already living with and in a relationship with the bar's "madame", Leda (Ogasawara).
This film is essentially an updated, gay take on the Ancient Greek tragedy Oedipus Rex by Sophocles. The movie is a fragmented, kaleidoscopic range of cinematic techniques and storytelling styles. The narrative flashes back and forth in time, cuts in news footage, skewed camera angles, on-screen captions, fast editing, and in one sequence dialogue is shown in comic-style speech bubbles. There are also documentary style sequences throughout where the actors are interviewed as themselves about the film they are making and about their lives, gender identity and sexuality. The soundtrack moves from classical music, '60s pop and updated versions of traditional Western music. The famous tune "The More We Get Together" is a recurring musical theme throughout the film. The film is often frustrating, frequently baffling, sometimes very shocking and also often very funny. The constant exuberance and invention means that it never gets boring, and there are strong performances, particularly from Peter, the stage name for singer, dancer and actor Shinnosuke Ikehata, in the lead role. Some of the film's themes, about the political tensions as well as the Tokyo avant-garde scene of the time, don't really translate well to modern, non-Japanese audiences, but it is worth watching as a snapshot of the underground scene of late sixties Tokyo, as well as a milestone of LGBTQIA cinema. One of the film's notable fans was director Stanley Kubrick, who credited the film as one of his stylistic inspirations for A Clockwork Orange (1971).
Funeral Parade of Roses
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