Welcome back to our queer film retrospective, “A Gay Old Time.” In this week’s column—to find comfort in these dark times—we’re escaping to a different time and place with 1969’s “Funeral Parade Of Roses”.
By Jorge Molina
This has been a rough week. With devastating election results and a regressive era of American politics looming in the very near future, we should focus on taking care of ourselves, turning to our communities and chosen families, and getting ready to fight back. But, at least for now, we all deserve a little escape.
So, for this week’s cinematic retrospective, let’s tack a trip to Japan in the 1960s to dive into an escapist experimental fantasia of queer community, go-go music, and oedipal complexes.
As we’ve discussed many times in the past, queer representation in the first two thirds of the last century was often coded, reprimanded, or non-existent in mainstream entertainment. It hasn’t been until relatively recently that we’ve gotten authentic, three-dimensional portrayals of what it means to live and exist as part of our community. Which is why it is such a breath of fresh air when a movie from an earlier period managed to show queer folks not just honestly, but in radical ways mostly unheard of at the time. The 1969 art house Japanese film Funeral Parade of Roses does just that.
In a dizzying and electrifying mix of narrative, documentary, and experimental film, Funeral Parade is set in the underground queer scene of 1960s Tokyo, and follows Eddie (played by Peter, one of Japan’s premier gay entertainers), a young transgender woman employed at a gay bar as a call girl.
Eddie is entangled in a love triangle with the owner of the bar and another call girl, and lives her day to day deeply immersed in the alternative arts scene of Tokyo. Through various flashbacks, we see her upbringing and the decisions that led her to that point in her life, and the tragic repercussions that her past has on her present.
The film was written and directed by Toshio Matsumoto and is loosely based on the Greek tragedy Oedipus Rex, particularly in the second half which features *spoiler alert* imagery of gouged-out eyes, incestuous plot points, and tragic turns of fate for the protagonist. However, what stands out most from the movie is not necessarily its story, but the radical and revolutionary idea that a queer adaptation of Oedipus set in ’60s Japan even exists.
