Funer­al Parade of Ros­es offers a peek into a hid­den world

The 1969 film Funer­al Parade of Ros­es, yanked back from the brink of extinc­tion via a new 4K restora­tion, opens on a con­text-free nip­ple. Direc­tor Toshio Mat­sumo­to obscures all dis­tin­guish­ing sec­ondary char­ac­ter­is­tics that may mark this patch of flesh as belong­ing to a man or a woman, squeez­ing out any hint of cur­va­ture with his extreme close-up. The bright­ly-lit mono­chrome lines look more like a land­scape than a reclin­ing nude, an abstrac­tion on an oth­er­wise fea­ture­less snowbank.

Any view­er recog­nis­es the human­i­ty in this anato­my, but the gen­dered specifics have been stripped away to leave some­thing simul­ta­ne­ous­ly for­eign and famil­iar – until a moment lat­er, when a woman’s head enters the frame to gin­ger­ly caress this anony­mous tor­so. Behold Matsumoto’s all-but-lost trea­sure in minia­ture: he decon­structs gen­der, ren­der­ing the alien known and the known alien, then uses pas­sion as a ves­sel to give his con­found­ing semi­otic tin­ker­ing shape. Funer­al Parade of Ros­es is a film of dense, often con­flict­ing ideas about gen­der, sex­u­al­i­ty, and how iden­ti­ty is forged through the del­i­cate inter­play between the two, but the extremes of lust betray it as a work both cere­bral and pri­mal­ly felt.

The face that intrudes on that first frame – a gen­tle, androg­y­nous face, eyes half-lid­ded and done up with mas­sive false lash­es – belongs to Eddie, a trans­gen­der street kid who iden­ti­fies as one of the ​“gay boys” of 1960s Tokyo. He’s into nor­mal teenag­er stuff: get­tin’ high, get­tin’ laid, act­ing on the unre­solved ani­mosi­ties towards his father (or, rather, his dad­dy) and the messy, charged dynam­ic with his moth­er. His reen­act­ment of the Oedi­pal myth guides what­ev­er sem­blance of a plot this film can be said to pos­sess, but it most­ly acts as scaf­fold­ing on which Mat­sumo­to can hang a por­trait of Eddie’s spe­cif­ic milieu. With a hal­lu­ci­na­to­ry cock­tail of nar­ra­tive cin­e­ma, avant-garde artistry, and ver­ité doc­u­men­tary styles, Mat­sumo­to tore open a por­tal to a world that, for many, was hid­den in plain sight.

Both Eddie and Peter, the monony­mous Japan­ese com­ic (so named for his habit of cross-dress­ing as Mary Martin’s Peter Pan dur­ing stage shows) who stepped in to por­tray him, were chil­dren of Tokyo’s hip-n-hap­penin’ queer under­ground. Bristling with the pan­sex­u­al aban­don of Weimar Ger­many with the added hedo­nis­tic ampli­fiers of easy drugs and pro­to psych-rock, this space per­mit­ted the ​“gay boys” the free­dom to live unapolo­get­i­cal­ly, if not as fig­ures of wor­ship. Both the sub­cul­ture and the film Mat­sumo­to built around it cel­e­brate the body in all of its man­i­fes­ta­tions, bina­ry and non-bina­ry. If the film objec­ti­fies the human form (in one of the more exper­i­men­tal touch­es, Mat­sumo­to fre­quent­ly cuts to a non-diegetic image of a butt with a bloom­ing flower stick­ing out of it), it does so in the same way the devout trem­bles before a graven image.

Mod­ern audi­ences may recog­nise in Funer­al Parade of Ros­es the DNA of anoth­er land­mark film about the LGBT com­mu­ni­ty, Jen­nie Livingston’s Paris Is Burn­ing from 1990. Mat­sumo­to punc­tu­ates Eddie’s psy­cho­sex­u­al spi­ral with non­fic­tion talk­ing heads inter­views in which he pep­pers the real-world gay boys with ques­tions about the lifestyle. He affords them a plat­form to speak about their indi­vid­ual jour­neys on their own terms, and in vocal­is­ing their expe­ri­ences, they move to dis­pel mis­con­cep­tions that still per­sist today. As one of the gay boys patient­ly explains that no, lik­ing girls and being a girl is not the same thing, and no, it’s not a choice, you can see him bare­ly sup­press­ing an eye roll. It could be a scene out of any awk­ward fam­i­ly reunion in 2017.

Like Paris Is Burn­ing, the film sup­plies edi­fi­ca­tion to an unini­ti­at­ed audi­ence with­out sand­ing off any of the edges that made this par­tic­u­lar scene what it was. The doc­u­men­tary seg­ments define ter­mi­nol­o­gy and bring those unaware of the par­tic­u­lars through an oth­er­wise insu­lar cul­ture. Matsumoto’s film opens itself up to all view­ers, and nev­er in a way that over-broad­ens the per­spec­tive. Con­sid­er the fact that one of the film’s most notable dis­ci­ples was con­firmed het­ero­sex­u­al white man Stan­ley Kubrick, who nicked one sped-up sequence from Funer­al Parade of Ros­es for the hyper­ac­tive fuck sesh in A Clock­work Orange.

It’s all too apro­pos that Mat­sumo­to bor­rowed from the Greek tra­di­tion of dra­ma for his film’s nar­ra­tive skele­ton. The ancient Athe­ni­ans believed that homo­sex­u­al­i­ty was a mark of refine­ment, even enlight­en­ment. This dizzy­ing swirl of fic­tion, metafic­tion and real­i­ty takes a sim­i­lar­ly rev­er­ent stance towards indul­gence, plea­sure, and the splen­dorous body. There would be an orgias­tic qual­i­ty to the film even if it wasn’t packed with lit­er­al orgies; it writhes with unruly life, burst­ing out all over, too fre­net­ic to be ignored and too sin­cere to be denied.

Funer­al Parade of Ros­es opens 9 June in select US the­atres. For more info check out cine​li​cious​pics​.com