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Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence Michael Brooke
One of the more bizarre international
co-productions of the 1980s, this teamed the great Japanese iconoclast
Nagisa Oshima (whose earlier provocations included Death By
Hanging, Diary of a Shinjuku Thief and the notorious In the
Realm of the Senses) with a cast that blended serious actors (Tom
Conti, Jack Thompson) with a trio of stars more famous for their
achievements in other spheres: musicians David Bowie and Ryuichi Sakamoto,
and TV comedian Takeshi (who would go on to effectively take over from
Oshima as the most internationally renowned Japanese film-maker through
such films as Sonatine and the marvellous Hana-Bi).
The setting is a World War II POW camp, still a highly emotive subject
as far as both British and indeed Japanese audiences are concerned, and
the central theme is the homosexual crush that a Japanese guard has on an
Allied prisoner. And added to that is the fact that the dialogue is as
much in Japanese as English (with many of Conti's and Sakamoto's lines
being in each other's languages), and there are probably more graphic
scenes of Japanese ritual suicide than I've ever seen collected together
in a single film - and you can hardly accuse producer Jeremy Thomas of not
taking risks: the potential for disaster must have been large and obvious
right from the start.
But the film itself is a triumph - for all the glossy packaging
(Ryuichi Sakamoto's soundtrack album was a global hit), this is a deeply
serious, impressively complex, richly imaginative and often very moving
study of two very different cultures simultaneously brought together and
driven apart by conflict. The English-speaking characters have the lion's
share of screen time, but the nationality of the director (who also
co-wrote the script, based on Sir Laurens Van Der Post's The Seed and
the Sower) means that he's not about to reduce the Japanese characters
to the usual inscrutable stereotypes we've seen in too many other war
movies.
But that doesn't mean he soft-pedals or finds excuses for the treatment
of the Allied prisoners, which is often brutally sadistic in the extreme
(ranging from casual beatings to more elaborate rituals such as the burial
of prisoners up to their necks in sand under the hot sun), and the fact
that we're allowed to hear the Japanese point of view doesn't make this
any more palatable. In any case, I doubt very much that that was Oshima's
intention, since he's spent his pretty much his entire career subverting
Japanese attitudes and institutions. Significantly, it's not just the
prisoners who are treated badly: guards are forced to commit hara-kiri for relatively minor infractions, as part of a code of
honour that is rigorously enforced at all times.
The Mr Lawrence of the title is played by Tom Conti, the only bilingual
prisoner, which means he can communicate with his captors via intelligent
debate as opposed to the brutish violence which they mete out to the other
prisoners. Matters become rather more complicated with the arrival of
Major Celliers (Bowie), an Australian POW who openly provokes the Japanese
through carefully judged acts of civil disobedience - not least his
refusal to admit to any crime in the first place - and who tacitly
provokes Captain Yonoi (Sakamoto) in particular. Yonoi is torn between two
emotions - that of the desire to destroy Celliers' free spirit, and of his
increasingly obvious passion for him, which expresses itself in a series
of power games that end up exposing Cellier's own shameful past.
It's just as well that the central trio is so impressive, because
Takeshi Kitano's Sergeant Hara constantly threatens to steal every scene
he's in (especially the ones that give the film its title). Rather more
surprisingly effective is Sakamoto's electronic score, which on paper
sounds wildly inappropriate but which actually suits the material
perfectly. In fact, I'd almost certainly give the film the full five stars
were it not for the flashbacks to Celliers' past life, which are staged in
such a kitschy way as to miss the emotional effect they're clearly aiming
for by miles.
But that's a relatively minor criticism of a brave and ambitious film that otherwise achieves virtually everything Oshima intended - though weirdly enough, despite both its artistic and commercial success, he only made two other films since: the painfully off-target would-be Buñuelian satire Max Mon Amour and the very recent Gohatto, which has yet to open in Britain at the time of writing (July 2000).
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