This is no Christmas movie (its greatest flaw may be its title, along with its awkward freeze-frame ending). It is, rather, an extraordinary Japanese film from 1983 about British soldiers in a WWII Japanese POW camp. Written by director Nagisa Oshima but based on a novel by Laurens van der Post, it uses both Japanese and British actors and makes heavy use of both languages. Among other things, it is a study of two cultures at odds, and an examination of what defines the Perfect Warrior in each.
Oshima, a veteran of the mid-century Asian "New Wave", makes the bold decision to use not seasoned actors but renowned musicians in two of his three lead roles: David Bowie, who had by that time honed his chops both on film (most notably in Nicolas Roeg's 1976 the Man Who Fell to Earth) and Broadway (as the twisted John Merrick in the Elephant Man), is the charismatic prisoner Jack Celliers, and Japanese superstar Ryuichi Sakamoto is the haunted camp commandant, Captain Yonoi. Sakamoto takes on the difficult task of speaking the bulk of his lines in English: it seems he has learned them phonetically, and they find no easy egress. Each English word sounds painstakingly, even painfully, extracted, which might under different circumstances backfire, but in this case serves to lend a vulnerable boyishness as a sort of anguished backlighting to his beautiful, mask-like face.
I'd forgotten how unusual this movie is. I saw it for Bowie when I was a kid, but walked out of the theatre half in love with Tom Conti, who is bloody marvellous as the affable and canny Colonel Lawrence, a man who finds himself caught in the middle of no small drama due largely to his facility with the Japanese language but also to his considerable heart. Two scenes stand out as examples of breathtaking acting: in the first, he is condemned to die for the smuggling of a radio, a crime he did not commit and which nobody truly believes he committed. In the second, he tells an abortive story about a woman he knew in passing in Singapore, a story which he ends up not telling at all, but in a way as real as any moment I've ever seen onscreen. Conti made Reuben, Reuben the same year, for which he was Oscar-nominated, and that's too bad, because in retrospect I think this is both the better film and the more impressive performance. Except for a few forays onto the old Hollywood backlot (American Dreamer, the Quick and the Dead) he's mostly stayed across the pond to work in theatre and television (although I understand he's showing up in Julie Taymor's Tempest). And I do miss him.
Meanwhile, Sakamoto's magnificent score lends an otherworldly, ethereal air to the already surreal camp-life, an air which is accentuated in the editing-room by heavy use of slow fades to black and an unhurried pace. The camera-work is lovely and unobtrusive: one particular favorite is a slow zoom from the back of a very formal Japanese military courtroom towards Yonoi, one of its presiding officers, as he first lays eyes on the prisoner who will transform his life into something unrecognizable.
And there's another thing: the numinous sheen of Van der Post's wonderful thought process shines through the lovely space Oshima has opened up for it. The culmination of all these disparate, beautiful elements -- musical, philosophical, photographic, -- is in an important work of art. Like that classic novel you feel you should read, and put off, and when you delve in at last it winds up haunting you.
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