535 Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence

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Mr Sausage
Joined: Wed Nov 03, 2004 9:02 pm
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Re: 535 Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence

#76 Post by Mr Sausage » Sun Dec 29, 2019 1:44 pm

I wrote elsewhere that "I'll take originality and invention, from form all the way to conceptual framework, over the traditional and the classical, no matter how well done they may be," but this is one of those instances where that's not the case. Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence is my favourite Oshima. I mean, there's no need to square this with my previous statement, I'm not required to be consistent in my tastes, but I do suspect part of this comes from the fact I find Oshima rather thin on a conceptual level. So however exciting and innovative he is on a formal level, the conceptual (and especially emotional) bases of his experimentation strike me as straightforward and easily grasped, even summarisable without loss. Oshima's no Robert Musil; he feels no pressure to analyze experience without reducing it. His experimental films feel, to borrow a phrase from R.P. Blackmur, complicated rather than complex. I'm sure zedz is right now buying a plane ticket to Canada to come slap me with a wet udon noodle, but there it is.

Even the New Wave film of his I like best, Violence at Noon, which is a terrific movie, I'm not over the moon about. I can appreciate the way Oshima uses form as content in it, how he constructs an emotional situation that's complicated and ambiguous and rather than examining it through drama, expresses it entirely through form. The confusions and mixed motives created by male toxicity are only comprehensible because of how the formal elements represent that very confusion, the push and pull between a complicated set of memories and desires. It's extraordinary--to a point. Because I also get the feeling that the emotional situation only exists for Oshima as a justification for extreme formal experimentation. He's less interested in the lived reality of his situation than the chance, as it were, to let loose expressively. Indeed the situation, tho' fascinating, may not even represent actual human emotions--and it hardly matters. Oshima, certainly socially committed in all the right ways, nevertheless strikes me as committed intellectually rather than emotionally, conceptually rather than sympathetically. So something like Death by Hanging can essentially hector the audience about systemic and other racisms and moralize about the death penalty without leaving the impression that Oshima sees racism and capital punishment as lived realities for actual human beings. They're social issues to be analyzed in experimental forms. Of Japanese New Wave filmmakers, I much prefer Imamura and Shinoda. With Imamura especially, no amount of formal experimentation or parody ever gives the sense that he sees his situations as anything but the experiences of real human beings. His commitment to life is total. Oshima--his commitments are political, social, cultural, etc., but stop just before they get to life. Or so it seems to me, anyway.

Which brings us to the movie at hand: I feel in Mr. Lawrence an Oshima who is very much concerned with difficult emotional situations as lived experience rather than intellectual material. I feel a desperate, sad, partially defeatist, yet half-hopeful commitment to humanity, to broadness, to cultural understanding, to connection. In a movie about a battle of wills between two emotionally remote, psychosexually unhealthy personas, it's the relationship between Lawrence and Hara that anchors the film and gives it its moral and emotional force. Oshima has always been a blunt filmmaker, but he earns the bluntness at the end of this film. Perhaps not a great film, but a very, very good one, and the one Oshima I'd eagerly watch again.

As for the elephant in Oshima's filmography, In the Realm of the Senses, it's for him what Lady Chatterly's Lover was for D.H. Lawrence: his most well known work and the one most are likely to seek out and judge him on, but for all its fame a far, far inferior work and not at all representative of his talents. Watch Empire of Passion instead. It's a lot better.

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