Funeral Parade of Roses (1969) [Masters of Cinema #32]

Director: Toshio Matsumoto
Writer: Toshio Matsumoto
Stars: Pîtâ, Osamu Ogasawara, Toyosaburo Uchiyama

A feverish collision of avant-garde aesthetics and grind-house shocks (not to mention a direct influence on Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange), Funeral Parade of Roses takes us on an electrifying journey into the nether-regions of the late-’60s Tokyo underworld. In Toshio Matsumoto’s controversial debut feature, seemingly nothing is taboo: neither the incorporation of visual flourishes straight from the worlds of contemporary graphic-design, painting, comic-books, and animation; nor the unflinching depiction of nudity, sex, drug-use, and public-toilets. But of all the “transgressions” here on display, perhaps one in particular stands out the most: the film’s groundbreaking and unapologetic portrayal of Japanese gay subculture.

Cross-dressing club-kid Eddie (played by real-life transvestite entertainer extraordinaire Peter, famed for his role as Kyoami the Fool in Akira Kurosawa’s Ran) vies with a rival drag-queen (Osamu Ogasawara) for the favours of drug-dealing cabaret-manager Gonda (Yoshio Tsuchiya, himself a Kurosawa player who appeared in such films as Seven Samurai, Throne of Blood, and High and Low). Passions escalate and blood begins to flow — before all tensions are released in a jolting climax that prefigures by nearly thirty years Tsai Ming-liang’s similarly scandalous The River.

With its mixture of purely narrative sequences and documentary footage, Funeral Parade of Roses comes to us from a moment when cinema set itself to test, and even eradicate, the boundaries between fiction and reality, desire and experience; consequently, the film shares a kinship with such other 1969 works as Masahiro Shinoda’s Double Suicide and Ingmar Bergman’s A Passion [The Passion of Anna]. Yet Matsumoto achieves a zig-zag modulation between pathos and hilarity that makes his picture utterly unique: a filmic howl in the face of social, moral, and artistic convention. The Masters of Cinema Series is proud to present Toshio Matsumoto’s Funeral Parade of Roses for the first time outside of Japan on any home video format.

When discussing Funeral Parade of Roses it is perhaps best to begin with its various stylistic impulses. From its blissed out opening sequence to the bizarre final shots, this is a film in which every single image represents either complete beauty or a complete surprise – or both. It’s as though debuting director Toshio Matsumoto wants to have it all just in case he never makes another feature and so throws in enough ideas to sustain an entire oeuvre. Besides the visual flourishes, we also have Brechtian deconstruction, documentary interludes, chaotic seeming yet utterly controlled editing devices and a score which would more readily suit a paranoid science fiction flick from the same era. Furthermore, Funeral Parade of Roses also concerns itself with homosexuality, cross-dressing, Oedipal tensions, student revolutionaries and recreational drug use – a heady blend which places it firmly within a whole series of pantheons: gay cinema, experimental cinema, sixties cinema, transgressive cinema, the youth movie, the cult movie. In other words, it’s a key work.

×

Funeral Parade of Roses (1969) [Masters of Cinema #32]

Close

At the centre of all of this is a truly striking performance by the formidable Peter, here playing Eddie, the narrative’s key focus and cross-dressing nightclub “hostess”. Indeed, it is Peter who wrestles the film away from Matsumoto and prevents it from becoming the oblique artefact from a bygone age it so often threatens to become. Certainly, Funeral Parade of Roses is by no means a film to turn to when seeking out a storyline – the trailer proclaims it as a “modern parody of Oedipus Rex” and there are hints of a nightclub melodrama/thriller à la Jean Negulesco’s neglected Road House, otherwise it’s more a collection of ideas and motifs. But our star focus undoubtedly counteracts (or at least balances) the various ploys Matsumoto has borrowed/stolen/adapted from both the nouvelle vague and US underground cinema made earlier in the decade (Jonas Mekas gaining an explicit onscreen nod). In between the intertitles and interludes there’s always the charismatic figure of Peter/Eddie to draw us in and smooth things out.

×

Funeral Parade of Roses (1969) [Masters of Cinema #32]

Close

Yet Funeral Parade of Roses isn’t really a character study either. The manner in which Matsumoto short circuits both the fact-fiction divide and plain chronology prevents us from ever getting genuinely close to Eddie, even though he serves as our guiding light. Rather the film it more a study of its time, of its subcultures and its underground. In this respect the sheer melange of what appears and occurs onscreen makes perfect sense and, more importantly, works. The chaotic seeming blend and continual barrage of ideas and images builds to a multi-layered representation from which we are almost free to choose from what we will. Matsumoto never forces our hand or opts for the dogmatic approach, but instead gives everything its equal share. At times the sheer quantity of this mixture can get a little maddening, yet it does ultimately add to an extremely rich work. From its use of a real-life gay bar as one of its backdrops to its embrace of the avant-garde, Funeral Parade of Roses presents an enthusiasm for all that falls around it, one which we’d do well to match in its entirety.

HomeCinema @ The Digital Fix

Funeral Parade of Roses is my favorite Japanese film. A beautiful, sleazy and fabulous myth of transvestites in 1960's Tokyo duking it out over who should be the head mistress at their bar, junking it out with local experimental filmmakers and sexing it out with lovers. The story is loose and revolves around the life of Eddie, transvestite host extraordinaire at local gay bar Genet, his affair with Genet's owner (Gonda), his hipster experimental filmmaker friends and his rivalry with Leda the transvestite-in-charge at Genet and Gonda's "official" love interest. Oedipal themes linger in the background all the time and erupt in the fantastic climax.

×

Funeral Parade of Roses (1969) [Masters of Cinema #32]

Close

The camerawork and the editing of this movie is fantastic. All scenes have beautiful composition, focus and contrast, sometimes getting intimate with extreme close-ups, sometimes going almost all white to illustrate ecstasy. The main storyline moves back and forth in time and is inter-cut with sudden whims of an experimental film-within-a-film, interviews with the actors and extras about their gay life or drug use, sped-up slapstick, fourth wall breaking and still images. In the director's commentary he compares his work to a mosaic which is a fitting term to describe the movie with, several pieces of scenes arranged in a seemingly random pattern that in the end form a beautiful movie.

×

Funeral Parade of Roses (1969) [Masters of Cinema #32]

Close

The movie is most certainly a product of its time, it has the late sixties written all over it, but the strong acting performances and the most well executed craftsmanship stops the movie from feeling out-of-date.

Do yourself a favour and don't look at any trailers for this movie, they all spoil the fantastic ending.

Kurutta

Special Features:
- New transfer from the director’s personal print
- Full length audio commentary by the director Toshio MATSUMOTO (in Japanese with English subtitles)
- Video interview with director Toshio MATSUMOTO (23 minutes)
- Promotional material gallery
- Original trailer
- New and improved optional English subtitles
- 40-page booklet featuring a new essay by Jim O’Rourke