Funeral Parade of Roses ( Bara no soretsu ) ( Funeral Procession of Roses )

Funeral Parade of Roses (DVD) (*)

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Original Title: Bara no soretsu
Alternate Title: Funeral Procession of Roses
Language Selections:
English ( Subtitles )
Japanese ( Dolby Digital 2.0 )

Product Origin/Format:
United Kingdom ( PAL/Region 2 )

Running Time:
105 min

Aspect Ratio:
Fullscreen

Special Features:
Cast/Crew Interview(s)
Commentary
Interactive Menu
Photo Gallery
Scene Access
Trailer(s)
Black & White
Booklet
Remastered

Movie filmed in 1969 and produced in:
Japan ( India, Eastern Asia )

Directed By:
Toshio Matsumoto

Written By:
Toshio Matsumoto

Actors:
Peter ..... Eddie
Osamu Ogasawara ..... Leda
Shotari Akiyama ..... Himself
Kiyoshi Awazu ..... Himself
Emiko Azuma ..... Eddie's Mother
Toshiya Fujita ..... Okei
Masato Hara ..... Male Prostitute
Shinno Ikehata ..... Tony
Chieko Kobayashi ..... Juju
Hosei Komatsu ..... Himself
Don Madrid ..... Himself
Koichi Nakamura ..... Gonda
Yukio Ninagawa ..... Guevera
Masahiro Shinoda ..... Himself
Yoshio Tsuchiya ..... Himself
Toyosaburo Uchiyama
Jiro Yagi
Nagaharu Yodogawa

Synopsis:

This violent dramatic bloodbath concerns a love triangle in a gay bar in Tokyo. Eddie (Peter) and the transvestite Leda (Osamu Ogasawara) both have sexual designs on bar manager and drug dealer Gonda (Yoshio Tsuchiya). Gonda fears Leda will expose him to the police if he does not give in to his/her advances. When Leda commits suicide, Eddie and Gonda are free to engage in their homosexual yearnings for each other. When Gonda discovers he is Eddie's father, he kills himself with a knife. A distraught Eddie then uses the same knife to cut his own eyes out.

Cross-dressing club-kid Eddie (played by real-life transvestite entertainer extraordinaire Peter) vies with a rival drag-queen (Osamu Ogasawara) for the favours of drug-dealing cabaret-manager Gonda (Yoshio Tsuchiya). Passions escalate and blood begins to flow - before all tensions are released in a jolting climax (that prefigures by nearly thirty years Tsai Ming-liang's similarly scandalous The River). With its mixture of purely narrative sequences and documentary footage, Funeral Parade Of Roses comes to us from a moment when cinema set itself to test, and even eradicate, the boundaries between fiction and reality, desire and experience. Consequently the film shares a kinship with such other 1969 works as Masahiro Shinoda's Double Suicide and Ingmar Bergman's A Passion. Yet Matsumoto achieves a zig-zag modulation between pathos and hilarity that makes his picture utterly unique: a filmic howl in the face of social, moral, and artistic convention. A feverish collision of avant-garde aesthetics and grind-house shocks (not to mention a direct influence on Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange), Funeral Parade Of Roses takes us on an electrifying journey into the nether-regions of the late '60s Tokyo underworld. In Toshio Matsumoto's controversial debut feature, seemingly nothing is taboo: neither the incorporation of visual flourishes straight from the worlds of contemporary graphic-design, painting, comic-books, and animation; nor the unflinching depiction of nudity, sex, drug-use, and public-toilets. But of all the 'transgressions' here on display, perhaps one in particular stands out the most: the film's groundbreaking and unapologetic portrayal of Japanese gay subculture.

Drama: The battle between two drag queens for control of a gay club in Tokyo, which resolves itself into a battle for the affections of the owner. The defeated one kills himself, but the victor then discovers that the owner, his lover, is his own father, upon which he blinds himself.

This product was added to our catalog on Saturday 04 April, 2009.

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