MERRY CHRISTMAS, MR. LAWRENCE
(New Zealand/Japan/Britain, 1983)
(Film notes by the Dartmouth Film Society)
(Copyright 1988, Dartmouth Film Society)
Celliers.............................................DAVID BOWIE Lawrence...............................................TOM CONTI Yonoi...........................................RYUICHI SAKAMOTO Hara.....................................................TAKESHI
A Universal Classics release of a Recorded Picture Company Production. Produced by JEREMY THOMAS. Edited by TOMOYO OSHIMA. Art Direction by ANDREW SANDERS. Screenplay by NAGISHA OSHIMA and PAUL MAYERSBERG. Directed by NAGISHA OSHIMA. (122 min.)
A curious film this, not surprising since it has been brought to life by a curious partnership of Japanese, New Zealanders, and British, and adapted from The Seed and the Sower by South African Sir Laurens Van Der Post, himself a POW of the Japanese in Java. It is early 1942. Japanese forces have blitzed Southeast Asia and have occupied the Dutch East Indies. They are cruel captors, the Japanese, loathing and scorning the wretched white prisoners who failed to die and surrendered instead.
A brief exchange illuminates. The senior POW, Major John Lawrence reveals his creed: "We make plans. We try to escape. To fight again. We get along with you as best we can. Confinement is not the end."
Replies Captain Yonoi: "I've already pledged my life and my death to my Emperor." In this and subsequent encounters, East and West are poles apart. Yet there are odd mutual feelings of respect.
Front and center Captain Jack Celliers (stunningly played by British popular rock personality David Bowie). Yonoi (the man behind the kabuki mask, Ryuichi Sakamoto) strives to impose his will, verbally with Lawrence, physically and psychologically with Celliers.
There are many similarities too. East and West: their vast differences on interpretations for discipline, honor, order, and obedience. The clash damns the one -- Yonoi dooms the other. The homo-erotic tensions are apparent.
Another unique actor, Takeshi, plays the sadistic Sergeant Gengo Hara, with odd glints of kindness, a sense of humor, and acceptance. Off the screen Takeshi is a comic with a wide following in Japan. As Hara he has the difficult task of playing a rough-hewn brute and his closing delicate moments before his execution as a war criminal. To the compassionate Lawrence, Hara poses a possibly unanswerable question. "Why, Mr. Lawrence, why me? I was only doing what all other soldiers did."
This is powerful stuff, and director Oshima has the master's touch. He handles theme, scene, and cast with great fidelity. An aggressive social critic and militant intellectual, Oshima has attacked the malaise of contemporary Japanese society through a body of over twenty-one works, qualifying him as the most influential film-maker of his country's New Wave movement. He received the Dartmouth Film Award in Spring of 1986.
MERRY CHRISTMAS, MR. LAWRENCE, has rightly been called the "thinking man's THE BRIDGE ON THE RIVER KWAI." Underlying, graphically depicted, is the golden thread of sustained emotion, the emphasis on the enormous differences that split East and West, captors and captives. The film deftly shows it would be simplistic to state the Japanese don't know any better and to fail to see that from their rationale, there is nothing brutal, wrong, or evil in their behavior. They would, indeed, expect no different if they were captives.
To writer/director Oshima as with original bookwriter Van Der Post, there are, really, no villains, no heroes, just human beings caught in the rough fabric of one another's culture, its assumptions and attitudes. In the end, Oriental and Occidental alike are both victims -- of leaders who believe they are always right, even divinely so, failing to see that the truth is that no one can always be right.
Finally, one is left with the riddle, the meaning of the title, spoken once and then a second time, both times jokingly by Hara the conqueror, then Hara the conquered. First in Java in 1942, while the cruelty is paramount, the joke is there and it somehow binds. Next in Java still, but it is 1946; the war's over, the captor is now the captive, condemned, as a war criminal.
They share the "Merry Christmas" merriment of the final greeting. Hara finds it inexplicably funny, Lawrence only mildly so. What do they mean, these four words? Author Van Der Post elects to call his man Lawrence, but with a "w" before the "r," not with a "u." So much with the name, but back to the title. Come out and tell me what you think it is all about. See if we agree.
-- Stuart Griffin
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