‘Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence‘ (1983) is not a Christmas film, despite its title. The film director is Nagisa Ôshima, a Japanese filmmaker of great talent and great audacity. If we must necessarily place the film in a category, it would be that of films about Japanese camps with European prisoners during World War II. But even in this category it would not be a typical film. Although it is based on a real biography of one of the survivors of these camps who wrote two books about his experiences during the war, the film addresses and combines two complex themes: the conflict between two opposing cultures in terms of their attitude towards war, including the acceptance of being taken prisoner, and the attraction between two men, given that this kind of relationship was forbidden and criminalized in both cultures that meet in the film, even more so when those involved belonged to enemy camps in the war. This combination of themes, the directing style and the presence of several interesting actors on the bill make this film worth watching even today, although many aspects of the production are questionable or have aged badly. Maybe not on Christmas Eve like I did.
The story takes place in 1942, in Japanese-occupied Indonesia, in a British prison camp. Five men – two Japanese and three British – face each other, soldiers from two armies face each other, two civilizations with radically opposite conceptions of war and death face each other. They may have in common the notion of honor, but each sees it differently. Japanese officer Yonoi is the camp commander and secretly a former conspirator for a purer and more traditional Japan. Sergeant Hara is one of his deputies, sometimes a sadistic torturer, sometimes a guard with humane tendencies, almost always drunk. The British officer Hicksley is the commander of the prisoners, while Lieutenant Colonel Lawrence, who had lived in Japan for many years, is the translator and tries to smooth over the conflicts, being suspected by everyone else of collaboration. The conflicts intensify when Major Celliers is brought to the camp. He is an officer who surrendered to the Japanese to save the lives of civilians in a village. For the Japanese, surrender and captivity mean dishonor, while for the British they mean only a form of survival. The camp commander seems to harbor feelings for the prisoner officer that go beyond respect for the enemy.
‘Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence‘ is interesting as cinematography from several points of view. The international production allowed director Nagisa Ôshima to assemble a bilingual and bicultural cast. In the key roles of Celliers and Yonoy, he chose to cast two artists known primarily as musicians: David Bowie and Ryuichi Sakamoto, who also composed the film’s music. Takeshi Kitano is a celebrity today, but Hara’s role in this film is practically his first major role in a feature film, we can say that it is the role that launched his career. Only Tom Conti (the performer of Lawrence) is a better-known actor, but for him too, the role in this film is a peak of his career. The narrative is sometimes drawn out and the situations described are not all believable, and David Bowie never convinced me as an actor. The scenes of confrontations between the heroes are memorable, even if some lines in the text are problematic, seeming to put a questionable equal sign between the two visions of the world that the heroes represent and especially between the torturing jailers and their prisoners. ‘Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence‘ is a film worth seeing both for its good parts and for the opportunity to discuss its controversial parts in an informed manner.