Gohatto (Nagisa Oshima, 1999) vs. Yumeji (Seijun Suzuki, 1991)
Gohatto After watching
Death By Hanging and from everything I had heard about Oshima, I knew that a Samurai film by Oshima wouldn't be anything like what I'd expect from a Samurai film. The movie is set in 1860s Kyoto amongst the elite Shinsengumi Samurai militia. I didn't really have any historical perspective on the role of this elite police force till after I got back from the movie but the film works pretty well even without all the background imo.
At its surface,
Gohatto feels like a gorgeously photographed chamber piece about homosexuality amongst the Shinsengumi militia. But that would be a gross oversimplification. It's really examining the codes that governed the Samurai lifestyle and the sexual (and otherwise) politics within this group. At some level, I think Oshima is not just setting out to question the sexuality of these revered ideals of masculinity but to highlight the fragility of this very code of conduct that seems to be held in such high esteem. The entire tale is really about how the mere presence of a newcomer can put the structure set in place by this code in jeopardy.
As such,
Gohatto has a simple plot - a beautiful androgynous young Samurai, Sozaburo (Ryuhei Matsuda is really perfectly cast as the handsome young Sozaburo with a slender physique and the arms of a superb swordsman), gets recruited into the militia and ends up setting off a chain reaction triggered by love, jealousy, desire and deception amongst the remaining officers.
What is interesting is the way Oshima depicts Sozabura not so much as a person but as an idea almost. Even though his presence forms the crux of the film and all the major events in the movie occur around him, he does not himself directly seem to interact with the events for the most part. He simply glides through the film, looking like some kind of beautiful apparition, while everything around him falls apart in his wake. In fact, he is depicted as being perfectly law-abiding, respectful of his seniors and a skilled swordsman to boot. It's the rest of the Shinsengumi that seems to be on the verge of collapse. Everyone's motives seem to be suspect and all characters seem to be untrustworthy and biased. One thing I have to mention here is that it took me a while to start taking all of this seriously. This might just be a case of loss in translation but there's a significant portion of the movie where all this suspicion is voiced aloud with several characters casting doubt on someone else by asking the question, "Does he too lean this way?" (this line gets repeated at least about 25 times in the movie) and it wasn't easy for me to get over the cheesiness of this line. To add to this, the Shinsengumi officers in the movie seem obsessed with each others sexuality and Sozabura's possible virginity and there's a lot of discussion about trying to get Sozabura interested in women. Who'd have thought that Shinsengumi militia share a lot in common with high-school kids!! Thankfully, I was soon sufficiently wrapped up in the story to be able to ignore the corniness of the dialog and the audience laughter that accompanied it.
Ultimately, the movie turns into a whodunit with an ending that is both frustratingly cryptic and incomprehensible and yet aesthetically really cool and beautiful (there's a scene in Kill Bill that I think might have been inspired by this ending scene).
While I enjoyed watching this movie, the experience wasn't perfect by any means. For one thing, there's far too much talking and like I mentioned earlier, a lot of it feels cheesy (at least in English) and really doesn't add to our understanding of all that's going on. Secondly, I felt like there was quite of bit of Samurai (and other) law and practices that are referenced here that are not at all obvious to those of us not familiar with these things. Per se, I'd be okay with this except that I found myself distracted by it wherein I'd end up trying to understand what these customs could possibly be. For example, there seems to be a formal code to gay relationships in feudal Japan wherein the younger partner is the object of love while the older partner is the lover of boys. This status, in turn, seems to be signified by the fact that the younger partner does not cut his forelocks. All of this is never really explained in the movie but there's some oblique reference to them. To balance all this out though, the movie is almost achingly beautiful and poetic and sustained sufficient erotic tension to keep me interested till the very end.
I think the biggest reason this movie works for me is that the movie does a great job of highlighting the outdatedness of the period in which it is set and makes the feeling of claustrophobia and pressure that probably accompanied all the formality and code of the Samurai lifestyle palpable and does all of this while being amazing eye-candy.
So Wikipedia informed me that this movie is a semi-fictional account of Japanese poet and painter, Takehiso Yumeji. I was utterly captivated and charmed by the images in this movie in the beginning. In fact, in the very opening shot, we see these dozens of brightly-colored balls being thrown up into the sky by a group of Japanese men and women in Western dress. Yumeji tries to push through them in Japanese attire. Suddenly, we see a woman in a kimono suspended from a tree like a puppet. Then there's a bizarre pistol duel where Yumeji is shot after which he is revived and told that he can't possibly be dead! Just seeing that colored ball soiree sent me rushing to the random screenshots thread and at that point, I had a big smile on my face and I was ready to give myself in to the craziness that I felt sure would ensue.
For all those people expecting a historically accurate account of a man's life, this is definitely not your conventional biopic. Suzuki isn't really concerned with the particulars of Yumeji's life. Rather, the movie seems more concerned with finding out what exactly goes on inside a borderline-insane and yet brilliant and talented artist's head. Mostly sex and nudity according to Seijun Suzuki apparently
!
Here again, there's not much to describe by way of plot. We learn early on that Yumeji is about to elope with a woman but gets distracted by several other women along the way, especially
Tomoyo, a beautiful woman who is in search of the body of her recently slain husband who later on in only one of the many logic-bending moments in the film randomly comes back from the dead! Basically, the entire film feels like a feverish dream in which we explore Yumeji's twin obsessions, art and women. The good part is that all of this is done in a really stunning and beautiful way. The entire look of the film seems to be inspired by Japanese art. There's a lot of use of colors and textures and aesthetically, the movie ends up being really interesting.
The narrative, on the other hand, is completely fractured and switches between surreal imagery (which I at least found interesting) to random slapstick (which wasn't really funny at all). For a while, it felt as though the narrative was becoming more cohesive once Yumeji meets the beautiful widow. But even this affair is conveyed to us in anachronistic fashion with Tomoyo being demure and chaste in one scene and then all sexual and libidinous in another! Similarly, Yumeji's interest in her shifts from scenes where he jumps on her and gropes her to viewing her with the eyes of an artist. Oh, there's also sex and nudity, of course. By the time a scythe-swinging bandit appeared on the scene, I was all but lost in terms of keeping track of characters and story. In addition to all this, Yumeji also keeps meeting projections of himself which only adds to the confusion.
Despite the chaotic narrative, I really can't say that I was totally disappointed by the film because the ending few moments of the film are just sublime and beautiful. Even without fully understanding what exactly the movie was trying to say, the ending just felt perfect to me. I just wish the 2 hours leading up to the ending had been more consistently engaging.
Neither of these two films is without its flaws. At the same time, both films have specific moments that were utterly cool and made me want to freeze them for posterity. Both filmmakers clearly have a distinct and really individual style and I am glad I got to explore their work through this bracket. Unfortunately, Suzuki's exploration of an artist's tortured soul drew inevitable comparisons in my head to Andre Rublev, which I loved, which didn't help
Yumeji's cause at all.
Gohatto just feels more successful in what it set out to do than
Yumeji, at least to me. So
Gohatto moves on.
Btw, the theme music from
Yumeji, it sounds so much better here: