What film got you hooked?

A continuing feature that asks prominent cinephiles "What film got you hooked on Japanese cinema?"


Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence - by Catherine Munroe Hotes


If I have to blame anyone for hooking me on Japanese cinema, it would have to be Nagisa Oshima. My first encounter with him was a screening of Gishiki (The Ceremony, 1971) in a class at Western. The impression was strong enough that when I stumbled upon a course on Japanese literature and film taught by Ted Goossen at York University I decided to take Oshima on for my final project. I dutifully watched all the films I could get my hands on, and was impressed by how each of his films challenges his audience’s comfort zone, but it was all just an intellectual exercise for me until I saw Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence (1983) and it struck a very personal chord for me.

Growing up in Canada with German heritage on my mother’s side of the family, it was always difficult for me to reconcile stereotypes about Germans with my family history. I would think of the photograph of my young great-uncle with the small swastika on his uniform while enduring the endless action and war films my male Canadian cousins watched. The one-dimensional Nazis of Raiders of the Lost Ark gave me nightmares for weeks after seeing them. When watching John Wayne war films I always found myself wondering about these faceless enemies they were fighting. The ‘Nips’ were depicted as being heartless, subhuman creatures with buckteeth, but surely each one of those “Japs” had a photograph not unlike that of my great-uncle sitting on the shelf of someone who loved them back home.

I had long banished action and war films from my regular screening habits when I watched Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence, and was shocked when it brought all these memories flooding back. It is perhaps not the most perfectly crafted of Oshima’s films, but it was the first film that I had ever seen that tried to understand war both from one’s one national perspective and from the enemy’s perspective as well. In an interview with Peter Lehmann, Oshima once said: “Sometimes my films approach the full blends and rich flavour that saké should have, and at other times they’re raw and they become the kind of saké that burns your throat as it goes down. But essentially it’s the same kind of idea.” I think Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence is one of the latter kind of Oshima films.

Based on the memoirs of the South African writer Laurens van der Post, the film shows the complex relationship between Japanese soldiers and their British prisoners of war. Tom Conti’s character, who can speak Japanese, tries to act as a mediator in this apparent clash of cultures. The focal point of the film is the homoerotic tension between David Bowie as Jack Celliers and Ryuichi Sakamoto as Captain Yonoi. These two musical megastars are fascinating to compare as icons of male beauty and to contrast their very different cultural identities and belief systems. Along with these three men, the fourth powerful performance in the film belongs to Kitano Takeshi in his debut film role at Sergeant Hara. He plays the role with great brilliance, contrasting the naïve childlike qualities of Hara with his terrifyingly sadistic torture of prisoners who go against his belief system.

When I first watched the film, I was also struck by Sakamoto’s captivating film score, but I must admit that I have grown weary of it over the years. It is quite disturbing that it actually gets played in Japanese shopping malls at Christmas.

Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence sent me on a journey of discovery through film after film by Japanese filmmakers that seek to complicate rather than simplify the idea of the ‘other.’ In the political climate of the years since 2001, films like Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence, Shohei Imamura’s Burmese Harp (1956) and Black Rain (1989), Isao Takahata’s Graveyard of the Fireflies (1988), and Renzo Kinoshita’s Picadon (1979) should all be required viewing for politicians of all stripes.

Catherine Munroe Hotes is an independent scholar of Film and Visual Culture. She writes the blog Nishikata Film Review, has been a contributing writer to Midnight Eye and is currently writing a book on Japanese Art Animation.