Cinema
Confused
Peter Ackroyd
Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence ('15', selected cinemas) Japanese prison camps have always been a favourite subject for those who like their brutality spiced with a little mystery, although there has seldom been anything as bizarre as this, David Bowie has been cast as Major Celliers, a British officer captured while trying to organise guerrilla resistance in Java during the last war; he is sent to the island's camp, where he becomes the un- official leader of a group of English POWs. Tom Conti plays John Lawrence, the most prominent among them simply because he happens to speak Japanese.
It was a brilliant stroke to have Mr Conti do most of the talking (the other English- men hardly say a word), since if he is recognised for anything it is for his voice that half-strangled drawl which sounds like a car braking on gravel; if a man could real- ly eat his words this is what would happen, as the phonemes are slowly chewed and swallowed. If he spoke Esperanto while concealed in a dustbin, it would still be recognisably Conti. And what are we to think of David Bowie? Certainly he is a most unlikely member of the British army, and although his androgynous looks may appeal to a Japanese audience (this is a co- production) his somewhat febrile manner will suggest the Kings Road rather than Sandhurst to an English one. He is an unlikely actor, as well, since his defining quality has always been his lack of presence — useful perhaps in the creation of 'im- ages' for the teenage market, but a positive disadvantage for an actor. The outline of any part he plays is always larger than anything he brings to fill it.
It is customary in films of this kind to portray the Japanese as religiose fanatics who like nothing better than to beat a dying man with bamboo sticks and thrust ants up
his nostrils with scalpels, preferably bowing to each other as they do so. There is a great deal of such gratuitous barbarism in this film — men tied to trees, or beheaded, or buried up to their necks in sand, are all part of the film's central preoccupation with death and violence. If it had been made by an English director and crew, they would have been accused of belligerent racism; since Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence is in fact largely a Japanese production, we must assume that it reflects a reality too powerful to forget or too obvious to dissimulate.
Linked with the theme of brutality is that of homosexuality: a Korean is tortured for having committed buggery (hard luck on the victim, who is not even English) and the commander of the prison camp, Captain Yonoi, conceives some kind of passion for the raffish Major Celliers; although since the captain devotes most of his already elliptical conversation to the ways of the samurai, the nature of that passion is not made entirely clear. This is a problem with Japanese actors: are they being inscrutable, or are they simply not acting? In any event the actor in question, Ryuichi Sakamoto, is wearing so much make-up that we will never know.
Homosexuality and violence seem to be de rigueur in films devoted to the daily routine of prison life, although Nagisa Oshima's direction does render them un- necessarily stagy — as if the dead hand of Mishima were holding the camera. Oshima has a habit of composing his scenes in an earnest and over-deliberate fashion: he will protract a scene for those important few seconds too long, and the extreme slowness with which the action develops suggests a ponderous demand that the audience ex- tract the maximum amount of significance from the smallest number of events. There are long and puzzling 'flashbacks' into Major Cellier's past, for example, in which the fact that he once deserted his younger brother during an unpleasant school 'rag' is meant to suggest the kind of guilt that pro- pelled him into the war.
This is not a particularly good idea — a variant of it having been used as a stick with which to beat T. E. Lawrence many years ago, and has since been endlessly employed against various heroes of various conflicts. The intellectual quality of the film is not ad- vanced any further by some banal discus- sions about the nature of West and East and how never the twain .... 'They are a nation of anxious people,' John Lawrence explains. 'They could do nothing indivi- dually so they went mad en masse.' This is not a particularly enlightening remark no doubt the same could be said of the English or, even the Germans — and as a concept it is on much the same level as the British stereotypes who are wheeled on from time to time. The putative com- mander of the English POWs is a figure straight out of the heterosexual aspects of Privates on Parade, and much less funny. As a result, we get Bridge on the River Kwai given a contemporary gloss, 'derring do' and savagery under the torrid sun con- flated with some identikit psychology. Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence, despite the obvious attempt to lend it an air of authenticity down to the last hara-kiri, con- veys an air of imprecision and unreality; the pretentious of the film leave it stranded in some theatrical arena where Major Celliers can embrace Captain Yonoi and leave the Japanese gentleman fit to be tied; and where the Captain, having recovered from the no doubt agreeable shock, steals a lock of the Major's hair as the limp stereotype fries to death in a sand dune. Altogether it is a terrible mess, in which prurience is elevated to the status of ritual without anyone understanding the ceremonies. The score, however, which sounds like the pop version of music used during rice planting, is excellent.
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