Capital Celluloid 2024 — Day 100: Tue Apr 9

Funeral Parade of Roses (Matsumoto, 1969): Prince Charles Cinema, 6.10pm


This screening is part of the Funeral Parade Queer Film Society strand (you can find full details here) and will be introduced by Sarah Cleary.

Time Out review:
Like Nagisa Oshima's contemporary Diary of a Shinjuku Thief, this still extraordinary film was a response to the 1968 student riots. But Toshio Matsumoto goes further than Oshima - into Shinjuku 2-chome, Tokyo's gay ghetto, to enact a queer revamp of the Oedipus myth. Popular young trannie Eddie (Peter, later the Fool in Ran) throws himself into affairs with a black GI and a Japanese hippie to drown out his memories of killing his mother when he caught her inflagrante with a stranger. Then he shacks up with Gonda, manager of the gay bar Genet, only to find out that the man is his long-lost father. Matsumoto splinters the story's time-frame, splashes captions across the frame and cuts in bits of ciné vérité and interviews with the cast - making it one of the most formally advanced films of the psychedelic decade.

Tony Rayns

Here (and above) is the trailer.

No comments: