Editor’s Note: Every Monday throughout June, Cinematary will be celebrating Pride Month with a series of essays written by some of our LGBT+ critics about LGBT+ films of their choice. Up in the rotation this week is Logan Kenny on Nagisa Ōshima’s Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence.
Retro Review by Logan Kenny
It’s difficult to talk about repression. Queerness can be defined by constant longing – the relationships built entirely on gesture and fantasy instead of tangible displays of affection and love. Living as a bisexual man, I’ve had moments of lingering desire, unattainable pursuits for connection with men who weren’t interested or available. Sometimes you feel something with someone that can never be – you stare at from across the room and can imagine a life together, imagine one beautiful moment where they see you and know that you’re the person for them too. I’ve primarily dated women aside from a year long relationship with a non-binary person and a couple sexual encounters with men, so I’ve never truly known what it felt like to wake up next to a man and be in love with him. And sometimes, I wonder what it would have been like if the boy I had a crush on when I was 13, the person I fixated on in my mind without even knowing my sexuality yet, had looked at me with that type of overwhelming awareness. The acknowledgement that neither of us knew what this was, but that it was something, and whether or not we’d discover it together or worlds apart, it would have existed at one point in time and exist forever in half-remembered memories.
Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence is the only film I’ve ever seen truly nail that lack of clarity regarding what your sexuality is and what these feelings are for another person. Mr. Lawrence is all about the unattainable. There’s no pursuit of naked flesh, no act of sex turned into fits of self-loathing, no alcohol-drenched stupors after orgasm, just the acknowledgement of a stare. The person you desire looking back at you, letting you know that they feel it too. It never can be – circumstances will make that impossible – but you’re not alone in your own head. Despite Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence having no explicit moments of gayness or anything physical beyond a brief shirtless scene, two kisses to the cheek, and the cutting of hair, it is the first film I think of when I think of queer men in cinema. They stare into each other’s eyes and they know that this longing will exist in their hearts until they stop beating.
The film is about four characters in a POW camp in Japan during World War II: the titular translator John Lawrence (Tom Conti), who acts as a communicator between the British prisoners and Japanese officers, Sergeant Hara (Takeshi), who is generally authoritarian yet capable of remarkable compassion, Captain Yanoi (Ryuichi Sakamoto), who is built entirely around honour and control, and the renegade prisoner Jack Celliers (David Bowie) who is actively disrespectful and committed to fighting against the injustices of the camp. Most films regarding POV camps focus on the escape process and the inhumanity of the soldiers inflicting torture upon them. Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence, however, isn’t interested in reducing this narrative to simple nationalistic propaganda on either side, but instead the momentary connections that can be forged even in the midst of war. The main focus on the film lies between Yanoi and Celliers, who are complete opposites of each other. Yanoi is rigid beyond words; his posture is tight and his code is inflexible. The idea of sacrificing himself for Japan provides him with a sense of honour, and he will break suffering upon any prisoners who prevent him from doing the utmost for his country. Yanoi has failed to die in an honourable way before, and is now trapped doing work where he is unable to perish in a way he views proper – stuck taking care of the enemy instead of slaughtering on a battlefield. Celliers is the opposite. Not only is he a passionate free spirit, who defies authority with his very nature, but he’s in the position that Yanoi wishes he could be. He is prepared to die for his men and his nation, and he will not lose sight of his honour even in the face of potential extinction.
In their first meeting, they sit on opposite ends of a courtroom. Yanoi is involved with administering charges and interrogating Celliers on his crimes, Celliers is on the stand defending himself. In their first moments moments, there is nothing more than respect between them; they are both just fulfilling the roles that war has forged for them. That changes in a moment when Celliers is asked to prove his wounds, to validate a narrative about his capture by showing the lashes on his back. He slowly unbuttons the shirt as Yanoi moves slightly closer to him, with Bowie’s piercing gaze refusing to look away as he reveals his chest and nipples to the courtroom. The important thing is that he doesn’t remove his shirt entirely – the focus is not on his body, but on the vulnerability present in revealing a part of himself. When Yanoi looks at the wounds and the pale skin of this angelic figure, he loses his composure, immediately shouting at him to get his shirt back on. Bowie’s glaring confidence and effortless sensuality, even in a clinical scenario, makes my heart stop. It feels like being a kid and seeing an attractive man shirtless for the first time, unable to truly process the fact that men can look like this, that there is potential beauty in bodies like your own. When someone who has an idea of exactly who they are and what they want from life is faced with a revelation like this, they can panic and shut down, unsure how to cope with this new sensation without lashing out. Every queer man I know who had that moment of truth – whether it was looking at a cock on porn sites or seeing the elegance of the masculine form in cinema – has reacted in a similar way. It’s a furious type of uncertainty and euphoria. When Yanoi demands Celliers put his shirt back on, you see a tinge of regret in his expression, not just that the material’s going back on, but that he didn’t get to see everything.
One of the most interesting ways that director Nagisa Oshima structures the film is in revealing Yanoi’s personal dilemma relatively early, positioning him as the vulnerable one overwhelmed with sensitivities that Celliers can take advantage of. Despite his authority as the camp leader, he is constantly struck by the conflicts in his head and comes across as an erratic flawed ruler, especially in comparison to Celliers’ relentless confidence in the face of the enemy. An attempted escape strengthens this dynamic further, with Yanoi’s desperation to die in combat and to engage with his crush taking over his need to control. He is willing to let this enemy of the state go free if he can defeat him in combat, and is infuriated when Ceillers refuses to continue his plot. He views the refusal as a symbol of rejection, horrified by the lack of interest that’s shown in this violent display of emotional connection. Bowie’s face while looking at this brokenhearted man approaches pity, with genuine empathy in his eyes even as he continues his sudden pacifism. For the first time, he truly sees the type of man that Yanoi is – just a scared boy in love who doesn’t know how to show it.
The reveal in the second half that Ceillers has just as much shit in his past that influences his recklessness isn’t surprising, but is absolutely guttural in its impact. The best sequence in the film is a flashback to his adolescence. We watch his childhood self walk in the fields with his younger brother as he sings, takes a beating to protect his brother from bullies, and get infuriated with him for not following his rules. Eventually, the young Jack grows into the Celliers we know, with Bowie looking like a clean cut Oxford man with his expensive blazer, impeccable haircut, and haunted aura. Adolescence has faded away from him, the everyday beauties of spending time with his family in a lush of flowers and peace have transitioned into empty academia and meaningless social standings. Oshima’s staging in this sequence is genius for two major reasons, the first being the iconic wide shot of Jack’s brother on the left being thrown into the air by the bullies as Bowie stands on the right outside of view, looking down at the ground out of shame. The second is the focus on the brother’s singing – this little boy’s voice stunning the crowd into silence for a few moments, with the ringleader’s face completely in awe by what he hears. For a little while, this child has created a moment of sublime artistic beauty, the last he’d ever create. Once it’s over, the booing starts, the bullying continues and the trauma is inflicted. After it’s all over, Oshima transitions into a shot of the younger brother standing alongside Celliers against a wall, and Jack’s expression is pitiful. He can’t even make eye contact with his brother. They both know that things will never be the same.
This flashback is crucial for a few reasons. It directly leads into Bowie’s monologue to Lawrence about being desperate to see his brother again but never having the strength to do it, how his life was successful on paper but completely empty because of his guilt, and the fact that his brother never sang a note again. The performance is towering work from Bowie, who is the best part of the movie. His lip quivering as his seated body shakes is a devastating physical performance and his line delivery is even better. The way he enunciates “absolutely nothing” in reference to his life before the war has haunted me for two years – I can viscerally feel the emptiness in his soul for what he did. But the most important part of Bowie’s performance is that it reveals to the audience that Celliers and Yanoi are two sides of the same coin. Both men are torn apart by guilt and desperate to die over it; they use the prospect of a glorious death as redemption for their failings in life. They have not truly connected with other human beings in their lives and seem to be on a collision course with certain annihilation. Celliers recognised something in Yanoi’s eyes during their standoff – a catharsis in knowing he’s not the alone in his regrets.
The eventual climax of this story could never have been a happy life together for these men, even with verbal acknowledgement of their feelings. This is a connection determined to live only through reflection. No one will remember the connection they had – there are no diary entries, no testimonies from those that knew them best. By the next generation, Jack Celliers and Captain Yanoi will exist solely as names on war memorials, known for their executions more than their accomplishments. However, for one little moment, on the final day of Celliers’ life, they achieved mutual recognition – the extinguishing of violent repression for a few seconds. The elements leading up to this pivotal action aren’t important. Everything falls to the wayside as soon as they touch.
In this climactic scene, Yanoi unleashes his frustrations on the entire camp, forcing the sick men in hospitals to stand tall and present themselves to receive his wrath. He is becoming overwhelmed with hatred and frenzy, slapping a sick man to death and forcing the leader of the POWs down on his knees to be executed by firing squad. Yanoi doesn’t care about the Geneva Convention; he doesn’t care about anything but displaying his authority through violence. He wants his man to watch as he finally showcases his power and stares into the hypnotic eyes afterwards to receive respect. Yet, like with everything else involving Celliers, nothing goes to plan for Yanoi. Jack steps towards Yanoi, blocking the scared captain on the ground with his body and with his regained confidence, he leans into his man and kisses him on both cheeks as he stares into the distance. This one gesture causes Yanoi to seize up and convulse in a state of hysteria, falling to the ground from the sensations going on in his body. Jack getting stormed by the backup guards and sentenced to death feels secondary for a moment or two, as all that consumes the mind is this interaction. The way his lips graze against his skin, how the kisses linger on the cheeks of Yanoi, how Sakimoto sells these fragments of time as if he’s seen the eyes of God itself, his eyes widening to the point of breaking. Their initial contrasts are back again – the impassioned stoicism of Bowie contrasting against the violent impulses of Sakimoto – but it’s different this time. There’s something mutual there, both men finally embracing their destinies as beings, not to sacrifice themselves through direct violence but expressions of love. There’s an argument to be made that Jack didn’t share the feelings of Yanoi – that he merely was perceptive enough to know how to take advantage of his weakness – but I don’t believe that to be true. After the intensive interrogation of his past, I believe that he could never lie to someone in a way that would inflict pain again, even to someone causing threat to his comrades. Maybe he didn’t love Yanoi in the same way that Yanoi did for him – maybe neither of them truly loved the other, just the idea of what that desire represented within them – but that doesn’t really matter in the end. All that matters is that final look between momentary lovers, that acknowledgement that nothing will ever be that special again.
As a side note: this masterpiece would not work as exceptionally as it does without the score of Ryuichi Sakamoto, who alongside giving the second best performance in the movie, gives the film its amazing musical theme. Every single time a variation of those main notes is used in the narrative, it puts tears in my eyes, especially in these climatic moments. The beautiful keyboard playing as Sakimoto’s face wells up with emotion is too magnificent to describe, with the underlying synths creating such a wall of intense feeling. It’s the kind of composition that you will remember for the rest of your life, one that has never ceased to have an effect on the way I listen to music and process images. Looking at Bowie and Sakimoto’s perfect, idolised faces coated in passion as the score overwhelms the audio is everything I love about cinema in just a few seconds. Just like how Jack and Yanoi defined the last moments of love in each other’s lives, the music here defines the movie as not just a towering work of queer cinema but as one of the most elegant and sensual films to ever grace celluloid.
There’s a tendency with movies about gay characters to end in tragedy, with death being commonplace in our stories, usually with one man being left to grieve his deceased lover. It can be overwhelming for art to confront the realities of the fallibility of our lives in this homophobic society, especially in historical films where homophobia was even more visible to the naked eye. Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence is no exception. Back in the late 40s, homosexuality wasn’t accepted at all, with heroes of World War II being forcibly sterlised by the British government because of their sexuality. The acknowledgement that a British hero and disgraced Japanese man had any physical love for each other would destroy their reputations forever. Maybe Lawrence and Hana never knew the extent of their love for each other. All that matters is that they can reflect back on that one Christmas when everything was perfect. Because of this reflective quality, Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence is maybe the only gay tragedy I’ve seen that doesn’t feel painful, that doesn’t cause a furious ache in my soul whenever I reflect on how many of us are dead. It’s the movie that reminds me that beyond the closet and the tragedy of loss, that there are millions of stories that I will never hear of people that truly loved each other. In spite of the world wanting them gone, in spite of an infectious disease or a world war, their love and passion existed beyond the homophobic confines of society. It’s important to recognise the tragedy of our history as a community, as painful as it might be. We can’t deny that there was a genocide that was inflicted upon us less than 40 years ago – but it’s equally as important to look back on all the people we lost and remember that so many of them got to love and lust and live their lives as gay men, even if the world meant that they were robbed of so many years. Sometimes I don’t feel queer enough, that I will never truly belong in our history and our community. Then I watch Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence and remember that all of us belong, whether we’re out and in a passionate relationship, or just able to give one perfect kiss before everything fades away.
