Set in late 60's Tokyo, Toshio Matsumoto's Funeral Parade of Roses is slightly based on Oedipus Rex diving deep into Tokyo's underground gay culture. Passionate and raw, it is a wonderful, harmonized mixture of documentary elements and avant-garde cinema. The movie follows Eddie, a gay boy whom I could not stop comparing to Edie Sedgwick for obvious reasons, portrayed by Shinnosuke Ikehata (commonly known as Peter), focusing on Eddie's past, fame and rivalry with the bar's Mama. The movie's title is a play on words: roses, bara (薔薇) in Japanese, is a symbol of homosexuality and also a shortened version of barazoku (薔薇族 ), the name of Japan's first modern gay men's magazine. One of Japanese New Wave's diamonds, Funeral Parade of Roses was a major influence on Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange.
Review of Funeral Parade of Roses
