Description
Watch the trailer
New 4K restoration!
This shattering, kaleidoscopic art film dives headlong into the late 1960s' unseen Tokyo night-world of drag queen bars and fabulous divas, fueled by booze, drugs, fuzz guitars, performance art, and black mascara. Transgender actor Peter (also in Kurosawa's Ran) gives an astonishing Edie Sedgwick/Warhol superstar-like performance as hot-young-thing Eddie. Working as a hostess at Bar Genet, Eddie ignites a violent love triangle with reigning drag queen Leda (Osamu Ogasawara) for the attention of club owner Gonda (played by Kurosawa regular Yoshio Tsuchiya, from Seven Samurai and Yojimbo).
Funeral Parade of Roses is one of the most subversive and intoxicating films of the late 1960s. Here, director Toshio Matsumoto bends and distorts time like Resnais in Last Year at Marienbad. He freely mixes documentary interviews, Brechtian film-within-a-film asides, Oedipal premonitions of disaster, Matsumoto's own avant-garde shorts, and even on-screen cartoon balloons. This dizzying whirl of images and sound may have influenced landmark films such as A Clockwork Orange. (Description adapted from Arbelos Films.)
(Dir.: Toshio Matsumoto, Japan, 1969, 105 min., DCP, Japanese with English subtitles)
Can’t make the screening? Funeral Parade of Roses is also playing at the AFI Silver Theatre June 27–July 3.
Image courtesy of Arbelos Films
Cost
Free. Register in advance (recommended)
