FUNERAL PARADE OF ROSES (1969)

It was interesting of TCM to run Toshio Matsumoto's film in the "Underground" time slot instead of during the customary foreign-film slot, as if the programmers thought Funeral Parade of Roses might be too radical for their regular foreign-film audience. Radical it certainly is, flaunting its Godard influence and featuring a "gay boy" as its hero. It's of a piece with contemporary Japanese New Wave cinema in its attention to political protest in the country, but its suggestion of an affinity between political and sexual radicals proves problematic given its sometimes satiric presentation of cross-dressing homosexual youth. Given the way it speeds-up catfights between transvestites or between them and a girl gang and presents them like scenes from silent slapstick, you have to wonder whether the film is pro-gay at all. You could believe that Matsumoto finds gayness as another form of rebellion as an end unto itself. He doesn't exactly hint at greater depths when he stages interviews with protagonist Eddie ("Peter," a performer best known as the Fool in Kurosawa's Ran) and other "gay boys" that show them unable to articulate intelligible reasons for their behavior, though one arguably gives the right answer, by today's standards at least, by stating that he was simply born that way. There doesn't seem to be much more depth to the political radicals we encounter, who seem as much preoccupied with making experimental films, getting high and having orgies as with staging demonstrations that seem little more than performance art. They're such losers at times that they drop eye drops on their tongues in a desperate effort to get high. One suspects that most of them couldn't articulate their motives any more eloquently than the gay boys do. Meanwhile, critics make a big deal of the Oedipus angle of Eddie's story, in which he becomes the madam (after fighting his predecessor) for a pimp/gangster who turns out to be his father, whose wife died by frequently-flashbacked violence. Once all becomes clear -- Eddie has kept photos of his family with the father's face burned out -- the dad kills himself and Eddie decides that the only thing to do is put his eyes out in classic style. Whatever effect he aims for is undercut when he makes his way downstairs to a street, where a crowd has gathered, but instead of reacting with appropriate horror they mostly shrug and go their way. They've probably grown accustomed to such performances, while the sheer archetypal nature of Eddie's situation simply underscores the extent to which he, like others, is playing a role rather than living a life, just like those people whose protests are nothing more than performance.  It didn't surprise me to learn that Matsumoto, who died last year, didn't make many feature films in his career, since Funeral Parade, howevermuch it revels in its radical techniques, expresses an inescapable pessimism about cinema's ability to change the world. It may change the way we see it, but whether anything can change how we behave and treat each other seems open to doubt after this film.