But then over the weekend I was going through my watchlist on Kanopy and saw the title Funeral Parade of Roses, a 1969 movie that I'd added to my list at some point in the past year, only because I was intrigued by the title and what little I could see of it from the image on Kanopy -- a variation on the image you see here. Enough of a variation, I should add, that I had to click into the details to be sure it was a trans movie.
For sure it was, but here's one different from 56 years ago: Back then, the term "transvestite" was what got used. And that was fine, then, but we've since moved past that word, probably for the best.
In truth, "transvestite" only appears in the Kanopy description of the Toshio Matsumoto's movie, and presumably only then to meet it on the terms of the era in which it was made. It never appears in the movie itself.
Though a "funnier" (a.k.a. less enlightened) term does appear. As one part of this experimental film in which an unseen interviewer addresses various homosexual men in Tokyo of the day, he asks them how long they have been a "gay boy." They aren't offended by the term. It was 1969, and that homosexuality dared speak its name in public at all was something relatively new.
Before going into too much of the particulars of the film, such as I am able to synopsize them, I'll start with the feel of it. If the first movie I watched last week, Runs in the Family, were the feel-good, it'll-all-work-out-at-the-end-of-the-day trans movie, Funeral Parade of Roses is something far more existential and bleak and ultimately sort of hopeless.
I read the plot synopsis on Wikipedia just now to remind myself of some of the finer details -- it was pretty late last night when I plowed through the final 20 minutes -- and it does have a plot that can be laid out fairly clearly and succinctly. That was not my experience of watching it, though.
This is an arthouse film with a capital A. In fact, much of what's here is the sort of thing that would later be spoofed by people like Wayne and Garth, only they'd attribute the style to Eastern Europe rather than Matsumoto's Japan of 1969. All the arthouse hallmarks are here, from use of black and white, to the periodic harsh editing and insertion of images that bear no relationship to anything that's come before, to the use of discordant and ominous music, to the free-flowing general lack of a plot.
What plot there is surrounds Eddie, played by an actor known as Peter. Peter does not, apparently, consider himself a trans woman (he's still alive), but he's a gay icon of sorts in Japan, and there would be no question of his legitimacy to play this role. Remember, this is a different time -- pronouns might be she, but they might not be, and clearly this character is not assuming a full female identity in that she (let's go with "she") uses the name Eddie.
Anyway, Eddie is a dancer at a gay club and is involved in a rivalry with the club's madame, Leda (Osamu Ogasawara), both of whom are involved in a relationship with the club's manager, Gonda (Yoshio Tsuchiya) -- Eddie covertly, Leda overtly. Eddie also is friends with an arthouse filmmaker and the filmmaker's crew -- the scenes from his film are wild -- and they all do drugs and go about town.
Subtextually, this is a film about self-loathing, fuelled by the perception of others loathing you. As has been the experience for transgender people in society who dare to show any of their tendencies, knowing that the largest percentage of people they come in contact with will show no willingness to accept them or even tolerate them. (Yes, there is a difference between those two terms. "Tolerance" is also, it strikes me, a term that has fallen out of favor, as it seems to indicate that this person has a power to tolerate or not tolerate someone. No bigot should have that power. They can mind their own fucking business and just let the trans person be.)
I kept writing down lines of dialogue that I thought made this movie seem really suited for Pride Month. Here was one:
"But gay boys have their own pride, don't you think so?"
And another:
"Each man will have their own mask, some they will wear their entire life."
And a third:
"If you love someone, their gender doesn't matter."
Matsumoto is confronting with his themes, mostly in a good way. There's a scene where Eddie walks through a gallery of various gruesome portraits of faces, but they're almost like more realistic versions of Picasso faces, with excess orifices in the wrong places, too many noses, that sort of thing. They are meant to serve as a hideous reflection of what Eddie thinks the world thinks of her.
There's happiness in Eddie's world, to be sure, and a certain wonder to some of the scenes captured that belies these feelings of self-loathing. I am thinking specifically of a scene where the camera travels up a tower so high that I thought it must be the Eiffel Tower, if the Eiffel Tower were in Tokyo. The camera passes various beams and openings as it ascends, looking out over the city. There is a Man With a Movie Camera aspect of what this film captures that I appreciated.
But we always return, in no uncertain terms, to the loathing, especially in an ending whose significance I didn't understand until I read the plot synopsis. The final images of the film are a striking representation of the way a "transvestite" views him or herself, depending on what pronoun they wanted to use, but I didn't quite understand what had literally happened in the plot to get us to that point. I may have missed it due to sleepiness, but I think the occasionally abstruse presentation of the story meant that I might not have gotten it anyway.
I felt a fascination with this film, but I did not always think it was successful. I suppose that's kind of the idea behind an experimental film. It confronts you with feelings rather than always delivering on a coherent story, and by definition, the choices it makes will work better for some people than others. I guess I wished it had worked for me a little more often than it did.
Still, I feel like I've seen a seminal document from its time, which I now understand has a reputation as something of a masterwork. And certainly, I didn't imagine I'd see anything so forthright in its depiction of these issues made at a time before I was even born.
I hope it's "gotten better" for trans people since 1969, but I fear it may not have -- not by the margin we would hope, and certainly not in Trump's America.
No comments:
Post a Comment