Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence
Synopsis
David Bowie regally embodies Major Celliers, a British officer interned by the Japanese as a POW. The camp commander is obsessed with the mysterious blond stranger, while the British lieutenant colonel Lawrence tries to bridge the emotional and language divides between captor and prisoner…
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Critics reviews
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.
Max Kyburz
January 11, 2017
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.
Kathleen Sachs
October 10, 2014
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