Oshima Nagisa is legendary for his movies of fatal heterosexual passion, especially "In the Realm of the Senses" and "The Empire of Passion." I wish that I could remember better or see again Oshima's WWII POW camp movie, "Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence" better than I do. I vaguely recall that there was more than a little sexualized sadomasochism in "Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence.",with David Bowie being the one tortured by a captain who is very sexually attracted to him (played be the composer Ryuichi Sakamoto, who wrote the music for that and for "Gohatto"/"Taboo").

I think that "Gohatto" (made in 1999, released internationally in 2000) is long and/or too slow. Particularly annoying are the inter-titles, mostly stating the obvious, though some signal how much time passes before the next scene. I guess the most defensible of the inter-titles is the series that lays out the samurai code. The samurai code did not prohibit passionate same-sex love. Only someone unable to read the inter-titles (in Japanese or in English) and completely unfamiliar with the history of wakashû-dô —the Dao (Tao) of loving boys, could think that "homosexuality" was tabooed. It was, rather celebrated as training in manliness for the young males of samurai families.

The samurai half of Saikaku' Ihara's very popular 18th-century collection Nanshoku Okagami is available in English as Comrade Love of the Samurais, and the whole is available as The Great Mirror of Male Love, and there is a considerable body of research available in English about the samurai cult of beautiful male youths (wakashû). The best academic study of the phenonemon in Garry Leupp's Male Colors, a book about which I posted one of my first epinions.

"Gohatto" (and most of the other edgy movies about samurai lawlessness and masterless samurai, ronin) begins very near the end of the Tokugawa era, in 1865. In the ancient Nishi-Honganji temple/martial arts school in Kyoto, those seeking admission to the Shinsengumi militia are being screened. Only two are accepted: a swaggering hirsute Hyozo Tashiro (Yadanobu Asano) and Sozanburo Kano (Matsuda Ryuhei), a tall, smooth-skinned beauty from a rich family. Given the looseness of the costumes and probably too much exposure to gender-bending Japanese and Chinese films (Twilight, The East Is Red, etc.), I wondered if the beautiful youth was being played by a female (though an exceptionally tall one!). He was not.

Kano's face may look effeminate, but he is an expert swordsman and more than ready to kill. He gets his first chance immediately, being ordered to behead a samurai who has broken the code. The captains of the militia want to test him, and he passes the test impassively. Indeed, everything he and every other samurai does in the film, they do impassively. There are passionate words, but rarely even a flicker of facial indication of feeling. Except for Toshiro Mifune occasionally looking sardonic, this impassivity in killing, in being killed, in bowing, and in being bowed to is true of the whole library of samurai films.

The beautiful young samurai desired by many, even those not heretofore drawn to that way (tao), mostly dodges the lusts he inspires. In the one sex scene is impassive as a not-at-all-attractive samurai takes him from behind. As in erotic Japanese woodblocks neither is naked. Especially for an Oshima movie, there is very little sex. Blood splatters aplenty, but the movie seems to have been too opaque for American fans of bloodletting.

The wakashû Kano is fairly sinister. Samurais were supposed to be ever-ready to die, and ready to kill, but not to desire to kill. Kano is excessively bloodthirsty: when asked why the son of a rich family wants to be in the militia, he answers "to have the right to kill." And though he expects to be the object of desire, he is not a devotee to wakashû-dô.

The extent to which beauties are responsible for the excessive reactions to them is an interesting one that I will not attempt to answer here. There is certainly literature urging them to compassion for those inflamed by lust for them (literature written not written by the youths, to be sure). Nor will I attempt to adjudicate whether the havoc is wreaked by Kano, by his suitors, or by favoritism across ranks.

The film and even its ending seem to be opaque to many viewers. The audience in which I saw the film seemed surprised by the casual acceptance (by non-samurais as well as by samurais) of boy-love and similarly unable to "read" the ending. I think that all the cultural knowledge that is necessary to interpret the visually striking final scene is that the cherry blossom is a recurrent metaphor for the inevitably transitory charm of beautiful boys. (At age 18, the forelocks should be shaved off, marking the extinction of boyish attractiveness of a junior samurai. Kano resists this rite of passage, as he dodges other attempts by Captain Hijikata to defuse his specialness.)

Oshima specializes in aestheticized representation of highly charged desires, lethal desires. "Gohatto" is often visually striking, especially in the final scene and in the prostitute sashaying to her appointment, but presumes a familiarity with a vanished society that even many contemporary Japanese lack (though they know about the militia and the dramatic changes of the Meiji "restoration" in 1868).

The least medieval character is Captain Hijikata (the top-billed actor/director/painter Takeshi "Beat" Kitano). The basis of his special interest in Cadet Sozaburo (and that of the other elder played by Shinji Takeda) remains open to multiple interpretations. The ending is profound, but apparently incomprehensible to some viewers.

There are some farcical elements (at least they seem farcical to me), impressive costumes by Emi Wata (Ran, House of Flying Daggers), and fine (studio) cinematography by Kurita Toyomichi (Pow-wow Highway, Cookie's Fortune).

I have an Asian DVD with no bonus features. Apparently, the New Yorker one has none either.

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I can recommend this movie only to those with some understanding of samurai codes and practices and tolerance for the Japanese eroticization of death—and in the case of Oshima, the view of desire as lethal to self and others.

I have discovered that my obituary for samurai films was premature. Details will follow (re: "Twlight Samurai").



© 2000, 2006 Stephen O. Murray




Recommended:
Yes

Viewing Format: DVD
Suitability For Children: Not suitable for Children of any age