Funeral Parade of Roses

FUNERAL PARADE OF ROSES   ***

Toshio Matsumoto

1969

IDEA:  The young, genderqueer Eddie copes with the effects of his traumatic childhood while navigating love and betrayal in Japan's underground transvestite culture.

BLURB:  Funeral Parade of Roses is a definitive work of the late 60s, not only for its emphatic engagement with countercultural politics, but for its freewheeling, liberated mélange of formal experimentation. Matsumoto positively doubles down on the puckish stylization and distancing meta-cinematic gestures of his French and Japanese New Wave peers, swelling his aesthetic arsenal with all manner of modes and techniques: vérité documentary, flicker film, slapstick comedy, Freudian melodrama, youth film, soft psychedelia, camp. The cumulative effect of this madcap pastiche is often exhilarating, reaching boundary-obliterating peaks of invention in alignment with the characters’ fluid gender identities. The constant dismantling of the film’s representational mechanisms and the quicksilver transformations of its form thus serve to posit a conception of the self as something constantly being remade and performed. Such a thesis is hardly radical, and despite its decadent, sensuous expression in Funeral Parade of Roses, rarely expands beyond a general philosophical truism. What is most novel and enduring here is what exists in the eye of Matsumoto’s whirligig storm: the unfettered reality of a queer Japanese underground, witnessed beneath and through the spectacle as the face of inchoate but headlong generational change.