Funeral Parade of Roses movie review (1970)

"Funeral Parade of Roses" does have a traditional narrative: transvestite Eddie (Pita) struggles with his identity while he and his lover Jimi (Yoshiji Jo) try to avoid detection from Jimi's main squeeze Leda (Osamu Ogasawara). But, in order to interrogate the way Japanese mainstream and counter-culture both fetishize and alienate members of the gay and transgender community, Matsumoto frustrates viewers' attempts at understanding Eddie based solely on his actions. We are treated to jarring flashbacks to Eddie's past, which hint at childhood molestation and a bloody murder. And we're treated to interviews with Japanese "gay boys," or drag queens who confess that they do not know why they choose to dress up like women. 

And every so often, music cues—specifically organ versions of schoolyard jingle "The More We Get Together" and Jacques Offenbach's "Infernal Gallop"—are sped up, chopped-up, or slowed-down to remind us that we're watching a movie. Matsumoto also periodically interrupts whatever action is happening on-screen by yelling "Cut" and revealing his crew working behind the camera on any given scene. Several scenes are interrupted with abstract word salad, like "Roses!" and "Sun, Severed Head." 

But what does "Funeral Parade of Roses" mean? Many times the film interrogates its value as a work of counter-cultural discourse. It presents an ambivalent love/hate attitude towards sex and cinematic language that suggests that Matsumoto wasn't sure if he could make a meaningful statement on Eddie's identity as a sexually active cross-dresser. He unravels layers of his characters' performative identities, and pokes fun at Eddie's colleagues' pretentiousness. Some of them, like pontificating stoner beardo Guevara (Toyosaburo Uchiyama), solemnly quote their favorite artists. Others are satisfied with the hypnotizing effect of the movies that they make, and pat each other on the back while seeking each other's approval: "What do you think?" 

But sex, like moviemaking and melodrama, is not an either/or proposition in "Funeral Parade of Roses." Eddie is performing for his clique, and he enjoys the attention that he receives from men like Jimi and his clients. But he also feels the futility of trying to rebel using his body/sex as a means of self-expression. Eddie willingly chooses to get stoned and stripped by peers in one drugged-out, quasi-Utopian scene. But that sequence is tonally just a stone's throw away from the film's many sex scenes, which bring to mind the way Alain Resnais filmed sex in "Hiroshima, Mon Amour" as a tangle of questing, insatiable disembodied limbs. You hear Eddie's ragged gasps. And you see him trying to find succor in art, whether it's a bank of posters for Pasolini's "Oedipus Rex," or a die-in performed by student activists. But no matter where Eddie goes, he is implicitly confronted by the limitations of speech, of language, and of his self. 

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