Funeral Parade of Roses

The film is so intertwined with the time of its creation, at least in a formal sense, that it is unnecessary to list all the cinematographic techniques of the second half of the 1960s that the film combines. However, it must be noted that it combines them skillfully and elegantly, a surprising fact for a feature debut. As for the film techniques, one could argue that the obvious inspiration from European and especially French art cinema is perhaps too apparent in a Japanese film. The content is wonderfully intertwined with the form, especially one of the central ideas concerning identity and sight: the LGBT characters, forced to rely on the mediation of sight to establish their own identity (it is their appearance and gaze that (does not) differentiate them from men), are constantly thrown into uncertainty and unreliability of the sense (the explaining scene on the observation tower), constantly aging, constantly resembling men despite make-up, and constantly losing their feminine mask - in short, constantly faced with the unreliability of what we are looking at and how. Essentially, the viewer is also faced with the same dilemma thanks to the use of destabilizing metafictional/quasi-documentary techniques that act as his/her sight. (20/06/2015)