Java, World War II. The Imperial Japanese Army is running a POW camp for British prisoners, under the supervision of Captain Yonoi. Lieutenant Lawrence knows Japanese and is thus used for translation, and is friends with Japanese officer Hara. Major Jack Celliers is accused of guerilla activity and subjected to a mock execution, but he doesn't flinch, which brings him the fascination of Yonoi. When a radio is smuggled inside the camp, the Japanese send Lawrence and Celliers to a prison, but Hara releases them for Christmas. When Yonoi wants to excute a British officer, Celliers makes a step forward and kisses Yonoi, who faints. The new commander buries Celliers up to his neck in sand, and the latter dies from the heat. After the war, Lawrence visits Hara, sentenced to death by a Tribunal.
A thematically similar "twin" to Lean's "The Bridge on the River Kwai", Nagisa Oshima's prisoner-of-war drama "Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence", based on the memoirs of Laurens van der Post, is an analysis of the inner conflict between two groups (in this case, the British prisoners and their Japanese guards) as a synecdoche for the wider observations of such manifestation in war in general, where one side wants to dominate the other. Some of the quotes have merit ("They were a nation of anxious people and they could do nothing individually. So they went mad en masse."; "You are the victim of men who think they are right... Just as one day you and captain Yunoi believed absolutely that you were right. And the truth is of course that nobody is right"). The two main actors—pop stars David Bowie and Ryuichi Sakamoto—were probably deliberately chosen for their roles for their lack of acting experience, to bring across how "out of place" their two characters are in the war, and who would rather be doing something else during peacetime, but the movie still failed to bring a more articulated point across, whereas it feels way too overstretched in its running time of two hourse. Some of the random moments of shocking violence and cruelty startle the viewers, most notably in the lingering sequence where the Japanese Army forces a man who failed to perform "harakiri", and who has a bandage over his stomach, to "finish the job", so the man takes a knife and takes a long time to stab himself in the abdomen area, whereas one of the prisoners is so shocked he bites part of his own tongue while fainting. These kind of moments weren't really necessary in the story, and fail to be anything more than cheap shots at shock attention, whether or not this was based on real events. The storyline meanders across several directions, not really knowing where it is going nor what it wants to say, but Oshima has a sense for some aesthetic shot compositions (for instance, the blue filter of night scenes) and shows irony in the ending where the tables are switched and the situation between prisoners and guards has been turned upside down.
Grade:++
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