Review 1
by Kevin Thomas
Los Angeles Times, August
25, 1983; Calendar/p 1
There is scarcely
anything merry about "Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence," a drama of life in a
Japanese concentration camp in Java that is insufficiently convincing or
illuminating to justify its two-hour display of ceaseless brutality. A
film of undeniable but unsteady power, of style and even stark beauty, it
is flawed fatally in various ways, not least by a streak of sentimentality
that is ever the reverse side of cruelty.
In
his English-language debut-actually, about half the film is in Japanese
with English subtitles- director Nagisa Oshima depicts violence as
obsessively as he did sex in "In the Realm of the Senses," but with even
less justification.
Japanese film makers have
frequently dealt with the frenzied, sadistic excesses of the Japanese
military during World War II, and far more effectively than in this
film-the first example that comes to mind is Masaki Kobayashi's nine-hour,
three-part anti-war masterpiece "The Human Condition."
However, "Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence," which
Oshima adapted with Paul Mayersberg from a Laurens van der Post novel, may
be the first film directed by a Japanese to show atrocities against Allies
prisoners of war - at least so extensively. We can only wish that if we're
to submit to such a grueling display or candor, that we be better
rewarded.
A Japanese-British co-production,
"Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence" was filmed largely in Rarotonga in the
Cook Islands.
Oshima wastes no time in letting
us know what we're in for. A Korean guard, having sodomized a Scandinavian
prisoner of war and been severely beaten for it, is expected to commit
hara-kiri. He botches it and lives, much to our surprise, to try
again.
Whippings, clubbings and kickings are
chronic in this tropical camp, whose latest arrival is a defiant British
daredevil (David Bowie), who surrendered but is on trial for his life
because the Japanese are convinced he is a member of an advance party for
a British invasion. But he is spared by the camp's young commandant
(Ryuichi Sakamoto) because he is instantly and profoundly attracted to
Bowie, and, one would suspect, not just for his
bravado.
At the heart of the matter-and
wherein the film is most effective-is a clash of values so intense as to
render the Japanese and their British prisoners incomprehensible to each
other. At the center of this conflict-the film's true star-is Tom Conti,
in the title role as a Japanese-speaking British liaison officer who spent
some time in Japan before the war.
If Bowie is
meant to be the film's heroic figure, then Conti is its persistent
humanitarian-a generation ago the late Leo Genn would have had the part
(and probably did). Sakamoto is its rigid, tradition- worshipping samurai
aristocrat, aptly described by Conti as a man "trying to become a
superhuman god." The film's Everyman is a stocky Japanese sergeant
(Takeshi). Jack Thompson, the British prisoners' commanding officer, is an
arrogant, hotheaded John Bull with wonderfully squeaky shoes-as soon as
you hear approaching, you begin counting on him to make each crisis
worse.
"I would admire you more if you killed
yourself," Takeshi says to Conti, who tries to explain that in the British
view there's no shame in being taken prisoner. And when Sakamoto orders
Conti put to death because a forbidden radio has been discovered. Sakamoto
does not deny Conti's accusation that he knows full well he had nothing to
do with the radio and goes on to explain that it does not matter. An
example must be set.
Yet all these clashes,
once the heat of the moment has passed, tend to be blunted. The
impassioned, intellectual Conti, deservedly heralded as one of the major
British actors of the day, has by far the best written part, but much that
astonishes and horrifies him in the course of the film smacks of
exposition; surely, someone we have every right to assume would be
familiar with the samurai code would scarcely be surprised by the brutal
harshness of it application.
There are lengthy
flashbacks to Bowie's youth, explaining his guilt over his betrayal of his
younger brother-and also allowing Oshima to contrast the savagery of a
British public-school hazing with the behavior of the Japanese military.
Through the flash-backs we may better understand Bowie's recklessness and
downright masochism, but we see nothing in the past or present to
substantiate the oft-repeated claim that he is a born
leader.
Sakamoto, one of Japan's most popular
recording artists who is making his acting debut, might better have
confined himself to the composition of the film's striking synthesizer
score, the picture's strongest asset. Sometimes barely intelligible in his
phonetic-sounding English, his entire presence and appearance remind one,
believe it or not, of Nita Naldi's haughty, sinister silent-screen vamps.
In lesser roles both Thompson and Takeshi fare better, but Takeshi is
stuck with having to play out the film's maudlin
epilogue.
That none of this interaction is as
persuasive as it ought to be makes it a poor check to all the surrounding
violence. Indeed, the whole handling of the film's incessant brutality is
further undermined by Conti's and Bowie's apparent capacity to absorb as
much punishment as cartoon characters. In one scene they may appear near
death from beatings, yet in the next seem fully recovered. As a result the
film seems morbidly preoccupied with violence for its own
sake.
There's no denying Oshima's
expressiveness and passion, but in his convention-defying rebelliousness
an fiery protest he has always been more uneven than Shohei Imamura and
Masahiro Shinoda, who also emerged in the 60s but remain less known to
moviegoers at large because neither has had a film that generated the
sensational publicity of "In the Realm of the
Senses."
Alongside "Boy," perhaps Oshima's
masterpiece (inspired by a true story of a child trained to be the victim
of car accidents for extortion purposes and a film that is charged with an
existentialist recognition of the absurdities and injustices of life),
"Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence" (rated R for all the bone-crunching) seems
pretty specious-and never more so than in the postwar epilogue when Conti
tells Takeshi that "nobody's right."
Balderdash: The bombing of Pearl Harbor was wrong: we were right in our
response, and innumerable Japanese films of far less pretensions than this
one have been acknowledging it for years.
Review 2
by David Denby
New York, September 12,
1983, p 80
Nagisa Oshima's Merry
Christmas Mr. Lawrence is one of those formal, blood-stained,
misterioso art jobs from Japan, filled with solemn rituals,
symbolic flowers, repressed homo-erotic tensions, and dishonored men
quivering with shame. It is quite hysterical and, at times, almost
completely baffling. Based on a novel by Laurens van der Post, the South
African-born novelist who lives in England, it seems to have something to
do with differing national traditions of honor. At a Japanese prison camp
on Java in 1942, the commander, a young samurai type (rock star Ryuichi
Sakamoto, who has a beautiful forehead), and his brutal sergeant try to
break the spirit of two British officers-a gentle humanist, played by Tom
Conti, who keeps getting based on the noggin with bamboo clubs only to
pick himself up and make civilized, rueful remarks, and an indomitable
hero who can take any kind of punishment, played by David Bowie.
Looking blissfully happy at moments when the
rest of us would be whimpering in misery, Bowie, who gelid blondness seems
more otherworldly than ever, delivers a long monologue in which we
discover the cause of his heroism: Years ago, in his native New Zealand,
he refused to defend his kid brother, a tiny hunchback, when a huge group
of nasty fellows were standing around jeering at the boy. Thus, he has
resolved never to betray anyone again. This scene, shown in flashback, is
staged so poorly that one can only giggle at it, and the same is true of
an episode in which a Japanese soldier, failing a mission, commits
hara-kiri as casually as someone else might remove a hat. Indeed, the
whole movie is so clumsy that we can't help noticing that both guards and
prisoners have nothing else to do in this camp but play obscure
psychological tricks on one another. At least in the David Lean-Alec
Guiness-Sessue Hayakawa version they built that bridge.
Review 3
by Janet Maslin
The New York Times, August
26, 1983, C10:1
David Bowie plays a born
leader in Nagisa Oshima's "Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence," and he plays him
like a born film star. Mr. Bowie's screen presence here is mercurial and
arresting, and he seems to arrive at this effortlessly, though he manages
to do something slyly different in every scene. The demands of his role
may sometimes be improbably and elaborate, but Mr. Bowie fills them in a
remarkably plain and direct way. Little else in the film is so unaffected
or clear.
"Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence,"
which opens today at the Baronet and the Bay Cinema, is sometimes merely
bizarre. It's an intriguing if inconsistent effort, by the director of "In
the Realm of the Senses," to use a Japanese-run prisoner-of-war camp as a
means of exploring the bewildering nature of war. In Java, in 1942, the
British lieutenant colonel of the title (Tom Conti) is reunited with Jack
Celliers (Mr. Bowie), a major from New Zealand whose powers of
self-control and defiance seem to know no bounds. Lawrence, who
understands his Japanese captors far better than any of his comrades do,
must look on in helpless understanding as they marvel at Celliers's
remarkable strength of spirit and ultimately respond to it with a savagery
and fear.
"They're a nation of anxious people,
and they could do nothing individually, so they went mad en masse,"
Lawrence says of the Japanese. The two main Japanese characters who have
brought him to this understanding are Sergeant Hara (Takeshi), a brutal
figure who taunts Lawrence while also admiring him, and Captain Yonoi
(Ryuichi Sakamoto), the handsome young camp commander, who has a fierce
belief in the samurai code. Both of these actors perform at an obvious
disadvantage, since their English is awkward and the motives of their
characters are imperfectly revealed. However, they are able to convey the
complex affinity that exists between captors and prisoners, a point that
is made most touchingly in a brief postwar
coda.
"Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence" can be
brutal and blunt, not just in its scenes of hara-kiri (there are several
of these) but in its occasionally stilted execution. The screenplay, by
Mr. Oshima and Paul Mayersberg, has a curiously dislocated quality. Though
it's based on a novel ("The Seed and the Sower") by Laurens van der Post,
the film seems almost more Japanese in its New Zealand sequences than it
does in the prison camp.
These scenes, which
are flashbacks to Celliers's boyhood, involve the way in which he feels he
has wronged his brother, who is an angelic-looking blond boy with a
beautiful singing voice and a hunchback. This exceedingly odd anecdote,
more consistent with the film's code of honor than with Celliers's
probable history, is most remarkable for Mr. Bowie's ability to stand side
by side with a boy of 10 or so, both of them sporting school blazers, and
somehow pass for a slightly older brother.
Mr.
Conti has some fine moments here, too, but his is the more passive and
less mysterious role. He is also saddled with some of the film's more
simplistic dialogue, and some of its more obscure responses. "Merry
Christmas Mr. Lawrence" is closer to a curiosity than to a triumph, though
its conception is certainly ambitious. Mr. Oshima has staged the film in a
spacious tropical setting and filled it with a great number of extras.
Even so, Mr. Bowie always stands out from the crowd.
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