The walls also have…
Images from BLIND BEAST. The ol’ factory.
Seriously, if you only rent one movie this year in which a blind sculptor kidnaps a young woman and imprisons her in a nose-lined warehouse, please please please MAKE SURE IT’S THIS ONE. I’m not sure how good it is, but it’s very individual.
Director Yasuzo Masumura seems like quite an eccentric figure. GIANTS AND TOYS, his shouty industrial satire, was pretty strange, BLIND BEAST lollops headlong into some apocalyptic realm of psychosexual lunacy, and I was most impressed of all with RED ANGEL, a sweatily intense, despairingly romantic doctor-nurse love story set amid the severed limbs of World War Two. I was with it all the way up until the portrayal of “comfort women” — Masumura characterises these forcibly-conscripted army prostututes as giggling imbeciles, when the reality is they were Chinese women abducted and raped by Japanese forces. It’s a bit like showing the nazi’s “Joy Division” as happy hookers.
In the UK, where veterans’ groups are forever pushing for an official apology from the Japanese government for war crimes against P.O.W.s, there’s a sort of low-level awareness that Japan hasn’t quite faced up to its past the way Germany has. One can’t imagine anyone portraying the nazi’s “Joy Division” as happy hookers, for God’s sake.
RED ANGEL is an amazing piece of cinema nonetheless, but I’m totally uncertain if I should even try to see past this colossal, shall we say, error of taste?
I mention it here because nobody else seems to have. It’s a moment that, for me, pushes the film into nasty BIRTH OF A NATION historical-revision territory, although at least the film hasn’t caused the kind of actual real-world harm Griffith’s monsterpiece provoked, and the criminal moment in the Masumura is arguably incidental to the main themes, which I don’t have such a problem with. Whereas Griffith’s problem is absolutely central.
May 2, 2008 at 6:04 pm
Can’t quite see the Birth of a Nation parallel. But the sexual pathology of Japanese cinema is an enormous subject, encompassing everyone from Masumura to Oshima.
May 2, 2008 at 7:09 pm
Well, suggesting that Chinese women abducted and enslaved by the Japanese were happy in their work is sort of comparable to suggesting that African people abducted by the British and enslaved by the Americans were happy and well-cared for, arguably. While the interest in sexual weirdness is fine, I think, this is historical revisionism, and it’s harmful in a film which is otherwise quite clear-headed about the horrors of war.
May 2, 2008 at 7:17 pm
True. But Japanese attitudes towards sexual violence overall feed into this. As for righting the historical record, Ang Lee’s Lust Caution made a decidedly awkward stab at it. I much prefer Mercant-Ivory’s practically forgotten The White Countess.
On another level criticsm of Japanees oppression of Koreans was a major theme in Oshima, eg. Death By Hanging and the sublime Three Ressurrected Drunkards
May 2, 2008 at 7:55 pm
There’s a general belief in Japan that sexual and violent images are harmless, but this seems to go along with a reluctance to examine what some of the images might be saying.
I have Lust, Caution lined up to watch…sometime.
Kurosawa witnessed some of the persecution of Koreans as a child, and it deeply affected him — but he never dealt directly with it in his work.
May 7, 2008 at 4:22 pm
Blind Beast is quite an eye-opening film. I love the way that the mother is the only thing keeping some sense of order to all the insanity (I can just imagine her hoovering the warehouse and feather dusting the body parts on the wall tutting and hoping that one day all of this amounts to something!) and there is a feeling that artistic work is cut off from any sense of reality and in need of a practical person behind the scenes to enable it.
I have not yet got around to Red Angel. Have you seen Seijun Suzuki’s mid-60s films Gate of Flesh and Story of a Prostitute yet? They might make interesting points of comparison.