Once Colin and I had spent enough time together with our eventual mutual friend John O’Donohue – another mystic artist – to consider ourselves friends for life, we coined the phrase ‘better than Kieslowski’ to denote anything we liked – ice cream, whiskey, art, music, even the way a cup of coffee tasted, but mostly just the depths of friendship. One of the last conversations I had with John touched upon how he considered love of this director to be almost a prerequisite for friendship!

Kieslowski is best known for two film series – the Decalogue, an abstract rendering of the Ten Commandments in contemporary life, and the three films that make up the Three Colours Trilogy – widely acclaimed as among the greatest films of the 1990s, taking as their theme the three facets of life represented in the French Tricolor flag – liberty, equality and fraternity. John loved these films – for their author seemed to know something about life that eludes the technojargon-dependent world in which we live: The meaning of freedom, partnership and family as outlined in the ‘Three Colours’ films is both attractive and sometimes difficult to understand – which, for John, meant it was worthy of attention.

So I was delighted when the Criterion Collection released the trilogy on Blu-ray and DVD recently. Criterion is exactly the right home for Kieslowski – the care and attention they devote includes offering special features that invite the viewer to take a long time to work with the grain of what we’re seeing. The Criterion edition of Three Colors is nothing less than one of the best home viewing collections ever released.

In ‘Blue’, the first of the trilogy, Juliette Binoche plays a recently widowed character, who in grief comes to learn the need to let go of the things that hold her back from being truly free; but realises that happiness is not real unless it is shared.

Along the way, Kieslowski shows us through some of the most delicately beautiful imagery in cinema (a child’s face lit within a traffic tunnel, a doctor reflected in a woman’s eye, the light on a woman’s face as she watches an elderly person try to recycle a bottle) what he feels about the world:

• That giving to others is what makes you free.

• That we need to learn discernment in a world which teaches us that television is reality.

• That the only thing people really want to know is whether or not someone loves them.

• That there is a relationship between the cross of Christ and love between human beings.

• That the political unification of Europe may hide some unpleasant truths, but is a miracle given that only fifty years before the film was made, European nations were battling each other for the soul of the world.

• That sexuality can be used both to heal and to sever.

‘Blue’ is a film about brokenness and the imagination of what new things could come to us if we let them. John would often ask the question ‘If it is true that nothing good is ever truly lost, what would you like to have back?’ The corollary to this, of course, is that there are some things that are worth letting go of. From the need for Europe to let go of its former enmity, to the old woman’s need and desire to do good by letting go of the bottle for recycling (an image fundamentally related to making the world better for future generations, and a reminder of what this woman’s generation suffered and struggled through in the Second World War era), to the central character’s profound dilemma – grief and what to do with it, the images and themes in ‘Blue’ deserve sustained attention. It is such a rich film for times that often feel impoverished.

The Three Colors Trilogy is available from the Criterion Collection.

For what it’s worth, I still think ‘Andrei Rublev’ is the greatest film ever made (and hope for a Blu ray release in 2012).

Just outside the top ten/Undiscovered Gems from 2011

Bridesmaids – a female ‘Tootsie’, and as good as that film.

Warrior – the most emotionally substantive ring fighting film since ‘Rocky’.

Road to Nowhere -a slow-burning endless loop return from Monte Hellman.

Anonymous – the most underrated film of the year: an inspirational comic drama about how art can change the world.

Cameraman: The Life and Work of Jack Cardiff – a delightful, educational, and ultimately lazy moving labor of love focused on a man who painted some of the finest images on film, and seems to have been one of the kindest people in his field.

J Edgar – An art movie with the guts to paint a historical villain as a human being.

The ‘B’ List

Rango

Rise of the Planet of the Apes

Contagion

Drive

A Better Life

The Descendants

Melancholia

Midnight in Paris – Which is glorious when it takes place in the past; but a little didactic in the present.

10: A Dangerous Method – A threesome with Freud, Jung, and Speilrein; the revelation of how flawed people can produce great work; an up close and personal engagement with how to get up close and personal with yourself.

= with: 10: Submarine – Brilliantly funny and smart coming of age in Wales tale; it’s a cliche to say it, but ‘Submarine’ is a British ‘Rushmore’.

9: Super 8 – Far more subversive than its reputation allows, more than a homage to Spielbergian childhood-wonder-and-brokenness adventure stories, but a love letter to the USA we want to believe in, wrapped in an alien invasion plot whose resolution provides a kind of fantasy wish-fulfillment for those whose vision of post-9/11 necessity asserts the primordial importance of restorative justice for perpetrators, and empathy with survivors in place of retribution and keeping victims in a place of idolatrised yet powerless martyrdom.

8: Le Havre – Gorgeous, color- and light-filled tale of community helping a lost one, managing to take in population movements, gangster cinema, the power of love, the greatness of baguettes, the simple miracle of living one day at a time, and the dissolution of boundaries between ‘The Man’ and ‘the man’.

7: Beginners – My favorite performance from my favorite actor – Christopher Plummer – in a charming, thoughtful, moving and gloriously funny tale about learning to be yourself.

6: Of Gods and Men – love and choice and attempted atonement for religious imperialism: facing the fact that each of us if going to die for something, so we should make it count.

5: Take Shelter – A film about terrible anxiety that gifts its central character with the dignity of allowing his suffering to become a gift to the world: Take Shelter takes seriously the notion that sometimes the people we call mentally ill are actually apprehending profound truth, and both need time to adjust, and could be part of our salvation.

4: Hugo – Magical, intelligent, exciting: I felt as I had done when I saw ‘ET’ at 7 years old, ‘The Exorcist’ at 16, ‘The Sacrifice’ at 20, ‘Magnolia’ at 24… that is to say, I was watching a MOVIE that understood something about life without feeling like it, offered eschatological hope, and elevated my sight beyond myself.

3: The Mill and the Cross – Maybe the ‘best’ film released this year – far as the revelation of cinematic art goes; certainly the best ‘Jesus film’ I’ve seen since Denys Arcand and Martin Scorsese tried their hands at it; a work of mystery, beauty, and profound insight into the human-divine condition.

2: The Tree of Life – Too many words have been written about a film that is more about the language of feeling and sensation than semantics. We could talk for hours about it, but I’d rather just experience the film again; Malick calls to mind Meister Eckhart’s astonishing adage that ‘the eye with which I see God is God’s eye seeing me’.

1: The Guard – My favorite film of the year; a perfect fusion of humorwish cultural critique displaying the best and worst of what it means to be Irish (and in Ireland) in the post-Celtic Tiger era.

When you’re watching Robert Altman’s ‘3 Women’ on Blu-ray, it would be easy, if potentially clichéd, to equate the grain of the image with the seriousness of the director’s intent.  It’s like looking at the lined face of an old professor; but on Blu-ray you can see inside the lines.  Everything looks so clear on the just-released Criterion edition, and the California desert images are so evocative of a world that hasn’t yet left the Old West behind that it almost makes you yearn to be watching it on a scratched and faded print at an isolated Drive In.  The trouble with Blu-ray is that it makes everything perfect, which sometimes crowds out the space for an imperfect human response.  It can be a bit like looking at the Grand Canyon: contemplation is invited, analysis pretty much impossible.  (Think of the difference between watching ‘Attack of the Clones’ in high-definition [on disc or theatrically projected] and the first time you saw ‘The Empire Strikes Back’ in a theatre; the fact that ‘Empire’ felt more substantial wasn’t just because it has a better script and you were six: the grain and the matte paintings and the models and, yes, even the performances, were more real than a computer can generate, or a digital image can convey.)

But a perfect film deserves perfect presentation, I suppose.  So ‘3 Women’ has what it warrants; and it wasn’t a bad way to spend a couple of mild insomnia-induced hours the other night.  Given that the idea behind the film came to Altman in a dream, we were on solid ground.  And when the camera opens us into a swimming pool in which young people are guiding the elderly toward their metaphysical exit, we the audience are being born too, so the shift in consciousness that comes late at night – reflective, open to something new – meant it was natural for me to be along for the trip.

Altman was an intellectual artist of the most engaging kind: his camera, fluid, as Bruce Cockburn would say, like the wind in grass, inviting us to observe just like he did, around and near the action, but never in it.  He was a man of vast tastes (too easy it is to suggest that because his films had a certain demeanor that the themes were unified – I mean, c’mon, this is a guy who had Anouk Aimee take all her clothes off to make a satirical point about fashion, put US army medics in a Last Supper tableau as a preamble to suicide, and had Harry Belafonte invert everything we think we know about Harry Belafonte so that he could channel Christopher Walken into a jazz era Missouri psychopath).  The intellect and tastes here engage the question of what it means to be human – so far, so much that’s-the-point-of-art, I guess – specifically what it means for its trio of female protagonists to be human in a world that wants to make them into machines; either as workers in the factory farm, or as the receptacles of men’s lust or anger, or as the bearers of the very image of humanity by having children.

These are not likeable people – played by Sissy Spacek and Shelley Duvall and Janice Rule – walking around in circles in the water as they’re dying.  Their faces are frightening, their behavior irritating; they invite pity at best, and sometimes fear, because you wouldn’t want to get too close to them, partly because they are carrying on the surface that which you fear most about yourself: that you will never know who you are, that you will always be alone in the world, and that you will spend your life trying to impress people who don’t give a damn.

The murals that Rule is painting in the swimming pool evoke archetypal myth; but the pool obviously has to be drained to permit the paint to dry: it’s a barren space for her to project her fantasies.  The 3 women seem to be animated only in their dreams: when Spacek’s Pinky convinces herself that she is someone else; when Duvall’s Millie thinks of the near-ridiculous cowboy Edgar; when Rule is painting ancient stories without ever uttering a word herself.  No one could accuse Altman of wanting to be someone else – or at least no one could accuse him of being obsessed with trying.  Is this the task of living: to avoid wanting to be someone other than who we are?  Maybe.  But is his coruscating critique of the lives of these women just cynicism?  Does the fact that the film opens with people walking round in circles, waiting to die, suggest nihilism on the part of its director?  I don’t think so.  ‘3 Women’ is the work of a man in love with cinema (not just the obvious antecedent in Bergman’s ‘Persona’, but the mythic American West too, and there’s even a touch of ‘The Exorcist‘ in the nightmare sequence toward the film’s climax)  – and just as Kubrick saw ‘The Shining’ as an optimistic film because it avers a belief in an afterlife, you can’t be entirely cynical if you’re in love.  There’s a very telling moment when Millie walks in on an elderly couple making love, on a night when they are distressed by something that has happened to a loved one.  Bad things happen, but you can still live; as a certain other film-maker/lover might say.  We’ve mislaid some of the tools that might be useful in determining how to function as a whole person; the task for now is to figure out how to figure out who you are without stealing someone else’s soul.

[Brief note: I’ve been thinking about something that Thulsa Doom, the bad-bad-BAD guy  in ‘Conan the Barbarian’ (which I saw for only the first time this month), says to the Austrian oak at that film’s violent climax, so derivative of the final encounter between Willard and Kurtz that it’s a good thing John Milius wrote that film too otherwise Francis Coppola would be the new Art Buchwald.  Thulsa Doom killed Conan’s mother when he was a child; and Conan has pursued vengeance against Thulsa Doom ever since.  When he is just about to kill his enemy, Thulsa Doom suggests that this might not be in his best interest, because his whole identity has been so shaped by revenge that he will not know how to live after eradicating his enemy.  ‘It will be as if you never existed,’ says Thulsa; and for a moment I thought that Milius was going to tell the truth about retribution: that it serves to perpetuate, not heal, the wounds of violence.  But such moments of philosophical clarity do not a Dino de Laurentiis 80s epic make; so Conan cuts Thulsa’s head off, and all is well.  Just such a kind of vengeance drives Pinky in ‘3 Women’, and in one of the most surprising collisions of artist intent I’ve seen, you can see a populist male version of ‘3 Women’ at your local multiplex right now.  ‘Warrior’ is a far more thoughtful film than its posters suggest; in fact, it may be the post-9/11/Iraq war/war on terror/WTF just happened? movie we’ve been waiting for.  Two angry brothers and a broken dad isn’t the most original narrative trope, but neither is love conquers all; doesn’t mean it can’t contain vast emotional truth.  ‘Warrior’ is about the need to transcend the violent shadow and the avoidance of anger alike; about how being a man who hopes to do justice to the calling of being human requires integration of what is too simplistically called ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’; about how people deserve a second chance, not least because your desire to withhold that chance from those who have harmed you may actually be continuing your own experience of woundedness.  It’s a wonderfully engaging, brilliantly edited, emotionally honest film that moved me.  Its vision of what the integrated US American male could be is the inversion of Conan’s path: violence begets violence until someone is willing to change the script.  We need an interruption.]

‘Warrior‘ is on general release; ’3 Women’ is available on Blu-ray and DVD from Criterion.

No big promises – but if you join me in the comments, I’ll be grateful and try to write more often.

My thoughts this weekend:

The proposed North Carolina constitutional amendment to ban recognition of same-sex partnerships is antithetical to the best of what the US stands for in terms of personal liberty and the pursuit of happiness; it is opposed to the spirit of compassion and respect and love for neighbor that are at the heart of the Christian teaching that everyone who supports the amendment cites as their reason for doing so; even while its proponents believe (or say they believe) the amendment protects their own marriages, if passed it will actually actively hurt people who only want to be allowed to have a measure of protection and recognition for the love they share, and therefore it follows will in reality undermine community as the foundation of society; it continues a tragic tradition of fear being used to oppress people who are already marginalized; it serves no positive purpose and in fact reinforces the social structural realities that lead to stories such as this one.

Groups like Believe Out Loud, Equality NC, and Faith in America are good resources for information and how to take action, but I’d want to emphasize one thing that is often, by my sights, neglected in anti-homophobia/pro-humanity activism: Genuine dialogue.  I changed my mind about theology and sexuality partly through relationships with people wiser and more experienced than I, partly through academic reflection, and partly through my own experience.  This seems to me to fit with the Wesleyan quadrilateral of engaging scripture, reason, tradition and experience as we seek to discern what is right, among other historic Christian ways of interpreting the world.  It is not a betrayal of Christian principle to be open to dialogue with people with whom you disagree.  It has a long and noble history.  I’m happy to talk with anyone who wants to know where I stand, what I think, and why I believe that a serious conversation about sexuality and spirituality is not just important for the sake of addressing the injustice of inequality and homophobia, but for the future of peace on earth.  I’ll write more about this later; for now, I want to invite a dialogue; and to ask you to seriously consider how we might persuade proponents of the anti-LGBTQ amendment that it is actually in their interests to vote against it.

Oscar‘s Ten Best Films of the Year:

Black Swan

The Fighter

Inception

The Kids Are Alright

The King’s Speech

127 Hours

The Social Network

Toy Story 3

True Grit

Winter’s Bone

My Ten Favorite Films of the Year (podcast review here):

Carlos

Hereafter

The Book of Eli

Lourdes

And Everything is Going Fine

Enter the Void

Howl

I am Love

Inception

Shutter Island

We took the rhetoric of ‘targeting’ political opponents beyond the dehumanising manifestation currently alive in US culture, and finding its horrific expression in the Arizona shootings this weekend; some of our current political representatives actually killed people themselves.  Anyone who worked for the state – police officers, civil servants, census takers – could be considered a legitimate target by Irish Republican militants; the daily nerve-wrack of checking under the car for a bomb became a fact of life.  And despite the protestations of some historical revisionists, for many Protestants, their religion and ethnicity seemed to be enough of a reason for them to be living in fear.   At the same time, the Irish Republican and nationalist community often found itself repressed by the state, living under suspicion, and abused into second class citizen status; pro-British militants killed many people just because they were Catholics.

Nearly 4000 dead; 43 000 directly physically injured.  And then, what?

We stopped.

We talked.

We took responsibility.

We made a deal.

Now, we govern ourselves; with former sworn enemies who used to violently threaten each other sitting in a legislative assembly together, not unlike a typical US statehouse; with a key difference being that we have imagined democracy as best expressed in consensus and compromise, rather than one community dominating another.  It’s extraordinary – you should look into it – there are huge lessons for all of us.

Books have been written on the role that ordinary people like us can play in shaping political processes that reduce violence*, but in the simplest terms, what I want to say about the potential lessons from northern Ireland for the US at this point in its precarious history is this: You have to get to the negotiating table now.  If you wait until another shooting or bombing or threat, nothing will have been gained.

After the peace process in northern Ireland had begun to take root, I chaired a public meeting at which the person widely believed to have co-led the IRA for much of its modern existence spoke about what he would like to see change in our society.  I began the meeting by asking him if, given that he had frightened me throughout my childhood, he could give me any guarantees that I didn’t need to be afraid of him anymore.  He first attempted to deflect the question, saying, ‘Well, Gareth, lots of us have reasons to be afraid of various people’.  I interjected, and offered a compromise, ‘OK Gerry,’ I said, ‘I’ll make you a deal: I’ll not give you any reasons to be afraid of me, if you don’t give me any reasons to be afraid of you.’  It was possibly snarky, but it was a start.  We shook hands; and I haven’t met him again, but he has pursued a non-violent political path; as have the rest of northern Ireland’s elected representatives.

They did this for many reasons – two of which are that they realised the cost of violence is too high; and because they allowed a third party – in the form of US intervention through the presence of Senator George Mitchell as a mediator – to help them discover something like the common good.  In talking, they started to reduce their own prejudice; and eventually, people who used to advocate each other’s violent death started sharing offices.  One even acknowledged praying with a man some of whose political supporters might have been glad to kill either of them only 15 years ago.

These things are possible when public representatives are given the space by their supporters to start talking about their opponents as human beings.  These things happened, not in fiction, but in the very recent past of an island only a few thousand miles away from the White House.  They happened partly because the White House offered help.  All this leads me to a simple conclusion: it is one of the gifts of the United States to help mediate in other people’s conflicts.  Amazing things can happen when US humanitarian intervention takes place, to provoke a vision of possibility that transcends the belief that things can never change because they have always been this way.  The US has the gifts to help others; this may be a moment when others need to help the US.

So, offered humbly, let me, as an outsider now making my home in the US suggest a few thoughts that may deserve reflection:

The fear expressed by many at the pace of social change is real, and needs to be responded to with respectful listening, not mockery.  Sarah Palin is a human being.  So is Glenn Beck.  They speak for a large number of people, whether some of us like it or not.  They will not be calmed down by being shouted at or mocked.  The degree to which the fears they articulate are genuine will only find its proportion when their political opponents treat them with respect, or at least show willingness to listen.  It works both ways of course.

There is a relationship between the psychological cost of recent wars and violent political rhetoric.  The cultural expression of what the United States means is part of the problem: seeing itself as a hammer leads to seeing everyone else as nails.  The world is too small to afford this.

As the tenth anniversary of the 9/11 horror approaches, it would be good to take time to ask if lament was postponed in favor of revenge; and then to finally start having a national conversation about how to grieve in a way that honors the victims without turning painful emotions into a reason to create more violence.

*A new example: later this year Oxford University Press will publish a volume on the role of faith-based groups in the northern Ireland peace process co-authored by John Brewer, Francis Teeny and myself

Those who knew and loved him were bereft; the most astonishing funeral and memorial gatherings ensued in such rapid succession, and went so deep that it seemed to be several months before we ran out of organised events to attend to remember the poet, priest, mystic, artist, humorist, and friend; a man so large in spirit that thousands of people were changed by his death.  It was a privilege to know him, and to be known by him.  I hear his voice on my i-pod all the time – I’m grateful that there were so many recordings made of his work; and I hear his voice in my inner life, calling me to live from my best self.

This year begins with remembering John on this third anniversary; and with reflecting on my own life, amidst wonder and challenge.  I, too, would ‘love to live as the river flows, carried by the surprise of its own unfolding’.  I, too, wish to be a blessing to others.  I, too, am frail and flawed and broken; and frequently fail to give to others what I want to receive myself.  John would, I imagine, say to me what he often said, quoting his mighty friend Lelia Doolan, that in times of confusion and fear, you should ‘steady yourself’, and let the light shine through the cracks, even – perhaps especially – those you have created yourself.

If we are to honor John’s memory, we might want to devote this year to one of his other sharpest and most elegant ideas: that the first friendship we must cultivate is the one we have with ourselves.  May 2011 be the year in which you become your own best friend.

Hearing Stanley Kubrick’s voice on the new Criterion edition of his coruscating anti-war melodrama ‘Paths of Glory’ is like listening to a ghost; not because the director has been dead for over a decade, but because he said so little in public when he was alive.  It’s one of the characteristic delights of a marvelous disc that provides thoughtful context for a film that was so dangerous to Gallic pride that it couldn’t be seen in France for over twenty years after its first release in 1957.  It’s a powerful, painful experience to watch; a story of true horror – on the Front, and in the chateaux occupied by sneering generals playing chess with life while Kirk Douglas tries to save his men from the evil that distorted notions of honor breed.

As is so often the case with Kubrick, the actors aren’t embodying characters, but playing archetypes – you watch Timothy Carey falling apart after being faced with his own death, and realise that he was cast because he acts the way most of us would – his face is crumbling under pressure, his voice a childish moan; it’s like a high school theatre performance.  And that’s not a criticism: it’s the strength of ‘Paths of Glory’ that the people in it – with the exception of the generals and Kirk Douglas – feel like you and me.

Kubrick’s philosophy of glory underwrote his entire career: the question of what makes  a real man surfaces in narrative arcs as diverse as that of Quilty in ‘Lolita’, Barry Lyndon, Alex Droog, and most transcendently, Dave Bowman in ‘2001’.  ‘Paths of Glory’ feels like a template for everything else Kubrick made: men sitting in large rooms and talking, men and violence, men and women, opulent ballrooms, classical music, resistance heroes unable to defeat authoritarianism.  Ego and power, and the echo of formalised feet dancing at parties taking place during wars.  So the function of ‘Paths of Glory’ is to invite us into an appreciation of the director’s later work, while forcing us to think about the idiocy of relationships between people who aren’t allowed to admit doubt.

Like ‘Seven Samurai’ (below), also released by Criterion this month in a magnificent Blu-ray edition, overflowing with genuinely fascinating special features, ‘Paths of Glory’ confronts the economics of death: men who think they are in control haggling over the lives of others, playing with them ‘for sport’.  It’s a short, compact film, which gets under the skin of its star, who in one of the special features – a 1979 BBC interview – reminds us that there was a time when actors were actually expected, and willing, to talk intelligently about themselves.  You feel Douglas’ compassion for his men; and his powerless position in the war game.  You don’t need to remember much about the absurd context for the First World War to experience despair when a man is executed while on a hospital stretcher.  You don’t mind the comedy bad guys because the story is so insane that they seem ironically to fit into its scheme, prefiguring the generals in ‘Dr Strangelove’.  And when it ends, with the heartbreaking, national boundaries-transgressing song from Christiane Kubrick, the actor credited here as ‘Susanne Christian’, a young woman whom Stanley met at a masked ball (there’s a Jungian coincidence for you) you wonder if the director didn’t look back on this film as being his finest declaration that the only thing worth fighting for is love.  Kubrick got a wife, Kurosawa got a profile in the West; the rest of us got two of the greatest films ever made.

The first scene of Nagisa Oshima’s ‘Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence’ (new on DVD and Blu-Ray from Criterion) is occupied with the horror of a soldier being forced to cut his intestines open as a punishment for being in love with another man.  The last image of the film is the smiling face of a soldier the night before his execution, beaming a greeting of filial affection to a former enemy.  We’re in a POW camp run under the auspices of the Japanese military, where Allied soldiers are half-subjected to, and half-ignored by an honor code that proposes self-disembowelment as the response, it appears, to just about any infraction.  In between the attempted seppuku and the smiling greeting, the adorable Tom Conti reflects poetically on the mutually assured idiocy of war, Ryuichi Sakamoto gets angry, and then gets healed while his fascinating and eventually ubiquitous score overplays but not so much that it bothers, and gorgeous burnt light provides a mystical hue to what is ultimately a nightmare that becomes a dream and then finally a reality the audience always wanted: reconciliation between people who were otherwise ready to kill each other.

But not before David Bowie saves the world.

This is probably the least actorly of Bowie’s screen appearances; his portrayal of callow/shallow and ultimately penitent youth is all the more resonant because he seems out of place in the movie: we know him to be something other than either the rigid Japanese or the sentimental English colonel; his off-screen status as chameleon works because he’s more like us than anyone else in the movie.  He wanders through a context in which violence is sexualised, men are murdered for loving each other, and everyone is fantasising about being somewhere else.  It’s probably the most erotic war movie ever made; it’s a perfect companion piece to the thematically similar ‘Bridge on the River Kwai’, whose British Colonel is the antecedent for Sakamoto’s character here: both men obsessed with honor over humanity, both undone at the last possible moment, both the points of deepest frustration for the audience.  The formal beauty of the compositions could overwhelm the point of the film: a kind of insider’s apology for, or at least critique of, his nation’s particular brand of nationalistic idiocy, which here is probably best summed up by the institutional nonsense of lying about killing.  Not far off my homeland’s own nonsense, nor that of the day I’m posting this, when a holiday is observed in the US, marking the arrival of a genocidal maniac who no doubt believed God and his queen had told him to love the natives by burning some of them alive.  Oshima and co-screenwriter Paul Mayersberg evoke Columbus and any number of other pioneers of the sacralising of violence, by having Conti’s character exclaim, ‘Damn your gods.  It’s your gods who have made you who you are,’ at the point where he realises that he is to be killed to preserve a sense of order that was psychotic to begin with.  And it’s in the confrontation of the madness of the scapegoat mechanism where ‘Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence’ takes on the deepest core of the human tendency to spiral downward into mutually assured destruction.  Regret for the past is why men war with themselves today; an unthinking assumption that someone must be punished is why we kill each other; and the film locates such regret and assumptions in nothing more complex than the cruelty of boys who become men without changing.

But it neither labors nor over-philosophises its point; Oshima trusts us to get it – the first scene is so memorable precisely because it starts half way through where you’d expect.  We’re right there – in an attempted imposed ritual suicide; there’s no introduction, no preparation, no consolation for those of us who want our war films to pretend that war isn’t murder.

At the end, I’m left reflecting on three things (beyond the easy admiration for the remarkable career of producer Jeremy Thomas, who in the splendid interview series on the Criterion disc seems to prove that he hasn’t lost any thirst for making films that are both aesthetically compelling and politically humane): How childhood trauma can both cause us to dysfunction within adult relationships, but might also provoke us to live differently; to avoid the suffering we caused others, or was caused to us when we thought we didn’t know any better.  On the role of sexual repression as a foundation for violence; and how a well-placed kiss could end conflict between people.  And finally, as Thomas says, how certainty is often the enemy of peace, for in war, ‘we are victims of men who think they are right’.  ‘Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence’ sounds, at first glance, like a humorous title; but it’s not, and it could not just as easily have been ‘Happy 4th of July’.  It’s a film that begins with a man being forced to torture himself to death, and ends with the anunciation of what, for Rene Girard, perhaps the thinker most capable of explaining why scapegoating kills us all, would consider nothing less than the axis of history.  Along the way there’s blue light, Bowie’s blond locks, Conti’s smile, Takeshi’s ambivalence, Sakamoto’s rage.  And a war film that sometimes feels like science fiction, sometimes like romance, sometimes like nothing you’ve ever seen before.