1969 flower movie
Rating: 16/20
Plot: Transvestites do their thing in Japan.
There's a narrative loosely based on Oedipus Rex in this mishmash of avant-garde tomfoolery, documentary-like interviews, and cinema verite; unfortunately, I had trouble finding it. Maybe I'm not as familiar with Oedipus Rex as I thought I was or am confusing it with something else.
This is the second Toshio Matsumoto film I've seen recently, and according to IMdB, that means I've seen half of his feature films. This is much different than Shura (Demons). It's definitely a lot more playful. There are title cards, sped-up slapstick sequences, sex scenes with this demented carousel music, talking bubbles, the use of still photography, those documentary-style interviews, some fly-on-the-wall footage of these transvestites playing strip balancing games or dancing, and an out-of-sequence story used to paint a picture of these particular people at this particular time. There's almost no subjectivity. I know Matsumoto's got a story in this, but it's less interested in telling that story than just showcasing these characters and their lifestyle. It's a pretty wild counterculture trip, one shaded by Godard and psychedelia but existing as this crazy beast of a film all by itself.
The performers were mostly non-actors, it seems. The main character Eddie was played by somebody named Pita who was a teenager at the time. Pita would go on to appear in a Zatoichi movie and Kurosawa's Ran. Though I suspect he wasn't playing a character much different than himself, I thought he really seemed like a natural here.
Allegedly, this influenced Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange, but I'm having as much trouble seeing that as I did figuring out what was going on with the plot. Surely it's not just the sped-up slapstick parts. Clockwork might be considered fairly wild, but it's definitely a lot more carefully planned than anything that is going on here.
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