by Steven Boone

There is a scene late in the film FUNERAL PARADE OF ROSES (1969) that might be the perfect HENTAI LAB specimen.  Leaving her apartment, breathtakingly beautiful crossdresser Eddie (drag performer Peter) stumbles across a student protestor lying wounded in a stairwell. She takes him into her apartment and dresses his wounds. He tells her about the police brutality he suffered, and why he puts himself at such risk for the cause of liberation. This brief, almost throwaway scene expresses the unlikely bond between these two strangers.

In writer-director Toshio Matsumoto’s  translated DVD commentary, he explains:

“On the one hand, we have a young guy who’s involved in the current student activist movement and on the other, we also have a gay youth who wants the right to live as a gay man and transform himself. They are poles apart, yet linked conversely by their similarity. This chance meeting between these two characters, both social outcasts, gave me the opportunity to introduce some supporting roles in the plot to symbolize this generation who didn’t fit into society and who opposed the inflexible cultural system of the times.”

At first, I had trouble with Matsumoto‘s terminology. He constantly refers to Peter and the character Eddie, as “he.” My problem with that was, well, just look at “him”:

My eyes had trouble agreeing with Matsumoto‘s assertion that his own film is about  a “gay youth” when Eddie and “his” friends are clearly determined to live as women full-time.

FUNERAL PARADE, which borrows from Oedipus Rex to explain Eddie’s ultimately tragic circumstances, at first seems to offer more pity and sensationalism than true empathy. It has moments of slapstick ultraviolence that reportedly inspired Stanley Kubrick’s A CLOCKWORK ORANGE adaptation.

So why does this film leave me so haunted and impressed? (It is currently threatening to go on my top 20 of all time.) Maybe because Matsumoto includes so much of the “real world” in his creation that it bursts free of his elaborate but stifling conceptual framework. Into a “shattered glass” non-linear structure he describes as Cubist, Matsumoto inserts interviews with the film’s actors and real-life social outcasts, including the “gay men” this film labors to cloak in humiliation and  tragedy. A blunt, antagonistic off-camera interviewer seems on the hunt for pitiable answers…

…but what stuck with me was how brave and determined these people were to be themselves in the face of social scorn.

even the ones who seemed a bit lost.

Likewise, in contrast to Eddie and her romantic rival, Leda (Osamu Ogasawara) both of whom grew up in the shadow of abuse and neglect…

…the actors who portray them seem to  be happy, well-adjusted folks.

Yet, Peter’s onscreen testimony exposes prejudices and hangups in my interpretation.

INTERVIEWER: What do you think about the hero?

PETER: He and I have something in common. His father leaves him as a child. His way of living resembles mine. His character, too.

INTERVIEWER: His character? Do you sympathise with him?

PETER:  Yes. But not in terms of incest, or things like that. But I do understand him.

———————-

So, Peter uses “he” as well. Was my sexual preference presenting a barrier to (or a condition for) empathy? What if the actor playing Eddie wasn’t so beautiful and feminine?

While the actors seem a lot more comfortable with the male pronoun than I assumed, FUNERAL PARADE’s avoidance of the term transgender (though “transsexual” comes up in one interview) and uniform reference to these people as “gay men” seems just as limiting as insisting upon “she.”

Oblige Matsumoto a bit of freak show condescension in his approach, because his ambition is quite vast. The film passes through various corners of the counterculture with a touch of satire.

The drug scene.

Anarchists and student demonstrators.

Drag nightclubs.

Underground filmmaking.

The art world.

Free love.

There’s even a heavy-handed (but no doubt provocative, for 1969 Japan) erotic episode that connects Eddie’s trauma with that of a black G.I. fresh from Vietnam.

“The boundaries between male and female are blurred. This is just one symbolic glimpse into this world, but so many boundaries
are broken in this world where boundaries are not delineated at all. To a certain extent we are shown how everything is jumbled or mixed together. Thus, one sees the problems that this can create.”  —Toshio Matsumoto

Matsumoto‘s wide net brings up so many riches of observation and beauty that I trust the vibrant storytelling before the somewhat cynical storyteller. More than the hippie panorama, it’s the found poetry and intimate details that make this film worth cherishing as something greater than a cultural relic.

The main storyline that Matsumoto cuts up and scatters about concerns the love triangle between club owner Leda and Eddie, her much younger, highly popular hostess. They are both in love with, or at least desperately attached to, a no-good smuggler named Gonda (Yoshi Tsuchiya). He tells each lover what she wants to hear.

The rivalry between Eddie and Leda, which recalls another mythic touchstone, Snow White…

…comes to boil as Leda starts to lose her ground with Gonda, who gaslights her into a frenzy.

The girls have a catfight in Manga-style comic panels and CLOCKWORK ORANGE-style time lapse.

The tone shifts constantly in this film. Scenes where Gonda and his lovers attempt to communicate with each other through means other than sex are as grave as a funeral:

In one closeup that stops the world, Matsumoto records the slow and spectacular breaking of Leda‘s heart after Gonda has told her she’s over the hill, too much trouble, and of no further use to him.

What makes this moment hard to shake, besides Ogasawara’s performance for the ages, are memories of the tenderness Gonda lavished on Leda in earlier scenes.

A gentle kiss on the forehead can be more emotionally binding, more potentially devastating than a full-on lip-lock. Matsumoto, for all his air-tight conceptual spiel and lack of sentimentality, evokes this basic understanding in various sublime images of lovemaking. This is the spiritual side of “erotic.”

The action is often so abstract that such notions as gender and sexuality evaporate in the intoxicating moment.

What matters is that two human beings offer each other comfort in some stolen corner of a chaotic and treacherous world. What seems so ephemeral may actually stand (in our collective memory) long after politics and wars and the lofty concerns of high art.

Yeah.

Let’s come down to earth for a moment, and return to that catfight. There is something sad about this petty burst of violence, but when you slow it down, you find Peter and Osamu laughing their asses off in every frame.

Wouldn’t it be nice to see a documentary on these two crazy actors? What ever happened to Osamu Ogasawara? Did he live much longer than his tragic character? IMDb lists only FUNERAL PROCESSION under his name. We know that Peter is still alive today, with numerous film and TV credits, including Akira Kurosawa’s RAN (1985).

Maybe one of the last barriers to true empathy is our capacity to imagine, and fervently hope for, a person’s freedom and happiness, no matter how alien they appear from our perspective or how great the odds piled against them. There’s a lot of bleak foreboding and tragedy in FUNERAL PARADE OF ROSES, but what makes it so valuable to me are the moments it shakes loose from all that shit, convulsing in fits of joy and light.

(Psst… check it out. )

CORPORATE HENTAI                                                                                   Possibly the most perverse video we will post on this page. Unilever corporation lures ordinary women into a deserted loft, then forces them to confront their own natural beauty. Sick, SICK. The following quote from Dove, on the other hand, is perfectly acceptable: “Only 4% of women around the world consider themselves beautiful.” If the remaining women are to be believed, that means we’re stuck with 6,694,788,896 ugly broads. No wonder there’s so much unrest in the world.

some scattered notes by Steven Boone

Harmony Korine’s SPRING BREAKERS is a tongue-kissing cousin of Chris Cunningham’s classic Aphex Twin music video, WINDOWLICKER (1999). Each work’s  vision of sublime, sun-kissed idiocy and hedonism seems to pour from the same wellspring of champagne and bodily fluids.

The blaring dubstep music that gives SPRING BREAKERS its comic buzz sounds like a less inventive descendant of Aphex Twin’s syrupy cocktail of digitally processed voices, instruments and ambient textures.

Cunningham’s clip adds  a touch of surrealism you’d expect from Korine: The jiggling video hoes are all, from the neck up…

… grizzly-bearded clones of Aphex Twin himself.

Korine’s possible response to that cognitive grenade is a scene where corn-rowed gangster Alien gives his bikini-clad teen proteges “blowjobs.” The girls shove their loaded automatic pistols into his mouth and stand up so that the weapons project at crotch level.

In each case, the symbolism is as juvenile as it is powerful. Cunningham’s is more nightmarish, more feverishly beautiful.

Endlessly repeated mantras (“I don’t give a fuck!” in WINDOWLICKER; “Sprang braaake forevuh!” in SPRING BREAKERS) and visuals (Korine’s bikini girls in hot pink ski masks; Cunningham’s bikini girls with monster faces)  become hypnotic, like a series of Buddhist koans improvised by an imbecile.

SPRING BREAKERS darkens the dreamscape by introducing GRAND THEFT AUTO-styled graphic violence; WINDOWLICKER does the same via unsettling creature effects. It’s a whimsical darkness.

These two films by different creators, separated by 14 years, seem as intimately linked as The ATL Twins, a pair of reptilian henchmen with the same demonic grin Aphex Twin sports in WINDOWLICKER.

It’s as if Korine and Cunningham woke up from the same Wigger wet dream-turned-nightmare and rushed to interpret it, each in his own drunkenly lyrical fashion. Alien’s mantra “Spraang Brake fo-evah…” seeks to erase the distance between the post-everything now of SPRING BREAKERS, the pre-millennium tension of WINDOWLICKER’s 1999 and all the mindless flesh fairs that preceded them, enshrining an experience even older than the phrase that puts it so perfectly, “Young, dumb and fulla cum.”

Cunningham and Aphex Twin, meanwhile, just want to mess your mind up for all time.

by Steven Boone

Yasuzo Masumura directed 58 films in a blazing, bursting career, but I had to stop after seeing only two of them, to catch my breath.

LOVE FOR AN IDIOT (1967)

and MANJI (aka ALL MIXED UP) (1964)

In these two hilarious, achingly sensual and sorrowful masterpieces, themes of obsessive passion, co-dependency, toxic power relationships and sexual politics play out in frames that are really cages.

Wong Kar-Wai could have watched only MANJI to get the visual template for his 2046.

The cluttered, lived-in production design looks like William Chang’s work on WKW films.

But none of it is for arty effect here. Not one geometric shadow, off-center composition or dash of color is wasted on frivolous aestheticism. Everything pulls together to describe the trap that these characters have lowered themselves (or stumbled) into, writhing in pain and ecstasy.

Characters pursue their elusive objects of desire with exponentially increasing obsequiousness, dishonesty and self-pity.

Their “love” is all mixed up with pragmatism and survival. A critique of the post-WWII capitalist scramble is as powerful here as in any film that Douglas Sirk made the previous decade. In Sirk’s melodramas, made for a victorious nation, the appraisal is implicit; in Masumura’s potboilers, made for moviegoers of a defeated empire, it’s explicit.

The performances might appear over the top for their intensity and volume. But anyone who has suffered an emotional breakdown/withdrawal is likely to recognize Masumura as one of the keenest directors of actors in cinema history. In the same year that she gave a feverish performance in WOMAN IN THE DUNES, Kyōko Kishida gives a volcanic one in MANJI.

There’s also a touch of Juzo Itami-like kinky absurdity. I could imagine Itami, who once acted in Masumura’s A FALSE STUDENT, drawing inspiration from his mentor 20 years later for A TAXING WOMAN and TAMPOPO—particularly the screwball energy of LOVE FOR AN IDIOT:

So, comparisons abound. Yet there is no flow of images quite like Masumara’s. He seemed to live by Kurosawa’s maxim of visual dynamism, tending to move the camera only when motivated by the subject’s movement in the frame, but with something like Kaneto Shindo’s or Kihachi Okamoto’s sense of desperate urgency. His cuts scream.

A second unit director for Kenji Mizoguchi and Kon Ichikawa early in his career, Masumura is considered one of those missing links between the Three Masters (Mizoguchi, Kurosawa, Ozu) and the Japanese New Wave. In Masumura’s universe, the elegant formalism of the former meets the radical social criticism of the latter.

Well, that’s what I got from watching just two of his films, anyway. Several names have come up in the fruitless debate over who deserves to be called the Fourth Master. Masumura is already my choice simply because of the way these two films end, resolving towering emotion and acidic irony in a single, breathtaking visual masterstroke. One ends in bottomless despair, the other in perverse bliss, but both sing the same song: There is simply no surviving modern life without love, and no happiness in it without a downright worshipful appreciation of beauty.

from a review of THE LIFE AND DEATH OF A PORNO GANG by Steven Boone

Despite all the blood and degradation and scraping by in “Porno Gang,” the most astonishing act of cruelty is a verbal one. The porno gang is a coarse bunch, but its members are generally mindful of each other’s feelings and space. The outside world offers far less consideration: At one point, the gang’s version of an MVP, a plump amazon who’s probably more inspired and daring an actress than Marko’s girlfriend, suffers verbal abuse from beady-eyed cops at a stationhouse. They say she’s fat and ugly and desperate for sex. Over here in the West, a media-indoctrinated viewer might be inclined to disagree with the cops only on the matter of style. Of course she’s fat, of course she’s ugly, but don’t use these facts to torment the poor girl. But Djordjevic’s camera shows us how robustly beautiful she is, not much more than average size, with a sweet, luminous round face. Whether it was his intention or not, this is Djordjevic’s most radical visual statement in “The Life and Death of a Porno Gang,” evidence that the outliers society tends to purge or render grotesque by economic exclusion are often the only truly beautiful people in sight.

Full review here.

by Maciel Marquez (excerpt)

…, I couldn’t help myself, but to constantly exclaim things like, “Oh shit! Dancer in the Dark is the same exact movie as this, but in opposite!” & other similar surprised expletives.

When I reached the ending I was truly convinced Lars Von Trier holds Hunter very close to **his heart, and realized Dancer was a sort of Yin & Yang ode. (Or just a very clever ripping off technique.) 

Read the full essay at

Soeur Lumière

by Maciel Marquez

“DOGTOOTH”  was generally reviewed & described as having themes about “over protection” & secularism and some even said it was a statement about Greek society. 

What Iclearly continue to see (because I keep going back to Yorgos Lanthimos’ films), is a theme of abuse & power and what happens before, during and after. Other prominent themes of his are: Control, blindness, incest, neediness, subservience,  hiding, disrobing, detachment, confusing, substituting, gross indifference, repetition, repeating longing scenarios & cathartic/ritual performances. Your typical ingredients for a Greek tragedy.

Mainly, Lanthimos’ films are magnificently composed & well lighted tales of functioning dysfunctional dynamics. The characters are mistreated individuals, whether by life circumstances or some weird dichotomy in some group or family.  The fact he accomplishes all of these complicated even surreal worlds in a very subtle blase way,only demonstrates the evolution of a powerful auteur. In Lanthimos’ films every shot is literally an extension of his complicated characters. 

Continue reading at 

Soeur Lumière

Manga grandmaster Osamu Tezuka’s short PUSH is a far more immersive, imaginative and entertaining piece of sci-fi than the trillion dollar PROMETHEUS.

by Steven Boone

DEMONLOVER would appear to be a perfect film to post on a page called HENTAI LAB, since it involves corporate espionage at a Japanese company that produces hentai (really silly adult animation).

But, as I mentioned in our first post, we’re not here for that. We mean “hentai” in the Japanese slang sense: weirdo. Strange, sensual and visually stunning movies go here.

Though this 2002 flick about corporate espionage and web 1.0 at its delirious tipping point now seems more dated than a Roger Corman biker flick (with the simulated Internet and New Media visuals pushing for sensory overload, little suspecting how much exponentially crazier such technology would get in the near-decade since this film’s release)…

… whenever Assayas uses the real world and not computer screens to create excitement, DEMONLOVER is as inspired and exhilarating as anything in his masterpiece, IRMA VEP.

Rain drops on windows, second-skin catsuits, tipsy handheld cameras following women up to no good down dark passageways…

Ambient noise music by Sonic Youth deepens the sense of atmosphere—in this case, one area where Assayas was years ahead of the aughts arthouse trend indulged by director-composer teams like John Hillcoat/Nick Cave (THE PROPOSITION), Jim Jarmusch/various (THE LIMITS OF CONTROL), Nicholas Winding Refn/Sunn O))) (VALHALLA RISING) and David Fincher/Trent Reznor (THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATOO).

His slinky, cat-burglar-of-the-future visual style could have benefited such needlessly top-heavy films as AEON FLUX and INCEPTION.

Speaking of top-heavy, Assayas seems the kind of guy who could keep his eyes fixed on a woman’s cleavage without missing a word of what she’s saying. Dialogue and sound design handle expository duties while the camera ogles like a construction worker.

Despite a boring fetish for bondage scenarios and indoor smoking (this might be the smokin’-est flick since the heyday of film noir), DEMONLOVER’s imagination soars when capturing ordinarily mundane gestures and interactions. Its mysteries don’t add up to much, but its transitional images are an ode to bob-cuts, dark rooms and devious women on the prowl.