Much of the movie leaves us in Eddie's head as she relives a cluster of agonizing recollections from childhood: her mother laughing at her when Eddie asks about her father; Eddie finding her mother entangled with a lover on the floor; the first time her mother caught Eddie putting on lipstick. That these three memories focus on Eddie's mother should alert you to the Oedipal themes that thunder throughout this heated and beautiful spectacle.
A heady affair, especially when seen in our aesthetically and politically conservative times. It imparts the thrill of witnessing the hedonism and lawlessness—both sexual and artistic—of a bygone culture. You also feel an almost tragic surge of melancholia watching it: where and when, you wonder, will cinema ever get quite this wild again?
Mr. Matsumoto's film is tastefully outré. It's also quite witty. "She loved roses, and they had to be artificial," someone remarks after the death of Eddie's precursor at the Club Genet. "Funeral Parade of Roses" may be dated, but its charms have scarcely wilted.
Both transgender and transgenre, Toshio Matsumoto's Funeral Parade of Roses, his first feature, updates Oedipus Rex by way of high-modernist Euro cinema, low melodrama, and avant-garde documentary.
Dense, frantic, and patently unclassifiable, the film is besotted with the decimation of binary strictures, a mission it pursues to extreme formal and narrative ends, sometimes to its own detriment.
The film was all but unprecedented in Japanese cinema for its (male) homoeroticism, and this trait only helped to make it more controversial at home. But in spite of these potentially dating aspects, this remains powerful filmmaking to many contemporary viewers.
Matsumoto mixes documentary footage (student demonstrations, interviews with queens) and self-referential gestures (we see the cast and crew at work) to create a near anarchic form that challenges authority.