Critics reviews

Where The Bridge Over the River Kwai is epic in scope and has a much wider canvas, Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence is small-scale and intimate, an extension and evocation of director Nagisa Oshima’s career-long thematic concerns criticising the dogmatic nature of Japanese conservatism... The performances are superb across the board... But Bowie’s the real star here.

Ultimately, the attempt to over-deliver on themes leads to a serious under-delivery of dramatic impact. This is a disjointed film, inexplicably a classic for some, that fails to engage with modern audiences.

Sometimes deliberately, sometimes unintentionally, [Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence] is strange, compelling and hilarious... [The film's] final sentiment, smiling and conciliatory, sticks in the throat.

Instead of portraying sexuality and obsession explicitly, the provocateur [Oshima] chooses to be more gentle in his visual poetry, even as violent acts of nature and man triumph. It's no typical POW film—the men are too starved and beaten to whistle cheerfully. There's no great escape either—whether prisoner or captor, these men are trapped by their cultural mores, and by their dark pasts.

Oshima's use of traditional filmmaking devices lends itself to his alternative viewpoint; long shots allow for all the characters to be equally represented and thus equally contradicted, an element of craft mirrored by Lawrence's assertion that "we are all wrong," and the symmetrical framing in many scenes is meant to reflect the traditionalism that Oshima challenges throughout.

the web of relationships between English and Japanese is too schematic in its polarisation of characters, Oshima's handling of the narrative is not so much elliptical as awkward, and Bowie's performance is embarrassingly wooden... A fair old mess.

Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence is a bizarre film that throws together different actors, acting styles and nationalities, and it does feel a little awkward and jumbled in places... It is also undeniably a unique piece that deserves to be seen and - given Sakamoto's memorable soundtrack - heard again.

[Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence] plays even better today. Bowie is superb, as is Ryuichi Sakamoto, whose evocative soundtrack is one of the best ever to grace a motion picture. It's time for you to discover Oshima.

As an exploration of cultural discord, Nagisa Oshima's film is pretty thin stuff, despite its reputation. Bowie is a potent irritant, but Tom Conti is solid in support and Sakamoto's mesmerising score sparkles anew.

[Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence] is one of the few Oshima works to wear its heart so clearly on its sleeve: never before had the director indulged in so many Old Hollywood moments, so many stirring, music-driven reveries... so much shameless tear-jerking... Not that Oshima auteurists are likely to be disappointed by the director’s temporary turn to such mainstream moviemaking fillips: his signature passions and political agonies are everywhere.

Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence fascinates mostly for the hit-and-miss alchemy of its discordant elements... [It] feels like a somewhat muffled, secondhand expression of Oshima’s radical sensibilities, but its stilted, misjudged strategems never raise doubts that it is the creation of a significant, challenging artist.

Lurid sadism blends with equally lurid lyricism in [Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence] ... Oshima appears to be treating ideas of elegantly transmogrified, purified emotions, yet the context and frequent incontinence of the execution bring the film uncomfortably close to the pseudophilosophical bondage fantasies of Yukio Mishima.