Every so often, a piece of art will come around that presses itself against the boundaries of its medium. Toshio Matsumoto’s 1969 filmic masterpiece "Funeral Parade of Roses" breaks them down entirely. The plot follows Eddie (Pîtâ), a young transgender woman, as she makes her way up the social ladder of Tokyo’s underground gay scene. However simple the premise may be, Matsumoto rejects conventional linear storytelling, and the film wraps time around itself in loops, refusing to reveal its hand until the shocking final sequence. Scenes are interrupted with subliminal vignettes, psychosexual imagery and documentary-style interviews of the cast, as well as appearances by real-life gender non-conforming people of Tokyo.
The film opens with a quote from Baudelaire: “I am the wound and the dagger, the victim and the executioner.” What follows is a dizzying, kaleidoscopic rapture of creative energy. Matsumoto’s opus recognizes no boundaries and breaks down the facades of social constructs, therefore questioning the nature of reality itself. Eddie’s friend, the comically pretentious filmmaker who calls himself Guevara (Osamu Ogasawara), quotes Jonas Mekas: “All definitions of cinema have been erased.”
With its fractured storylines, film-within-a-film asides and avant-garde approach to editing, “Funeral Parade of Roses” locks its meanings away from the viewer and challenges them to piece it together. Luckily, Matsumoto left a key behind: the allegory of the mask. After witnessing a street protest, Eddie dips into an alleyway to avoid a catcaller and finds herself in an underground experimental art exhibit. There is a reel-to-reel recorder on the floor playing a monotone voice, saying, “Some will wear the same mask for their entire life … Some masks are so ugly and obvious. But some masks are well made, and it’s hard to tell if it’s a mask or not …” The room begins to spin as Eddie falls into a trance-like state. “Under those masks, people try to escape their loneliness,” the voice drones on. In her trance, Eddie relives childhood traumas: the abuse and abandonment from her father, the dismissal and disgust from her mother and her mother’s eventual murder at Eddie’s hands.
In the first interview aside, a young, trans woman in a flowery kimono sits in front of the camera. “Why did you become a gay boy?” a voice (possibly Matsumoto) from behind the camera asks her. “Because I wanted to be a girl. I just like it,” she answers. The “gay boys” in this film wear a series of masks. The appearance that they spend so much time maintaining hides the truth of their bodies, which in turn hides the truth of their soul: their identities.
On first viewing, it is easy to see Matsumoto’s characters as transgender women, chalking up the term “gay boy,” as a well-meaning yet harmful vestige of the transphobic language of the time. However, as the interviews progress, it becomes clear that "Funeral Parade of Roses" rejects such narrow definitions. In truth, a “gay boy” can be neither gay nor a boy, but rather a catch-all term for any queer or gender non-conforming person assigned male at birth. However, they still engage in the performances that their veneers suggest. In the film’s opening scene, we see Eddie and her lover Gonda through close-ups, flesh pressed into flesh against a sparse white background, not as two men or a man and a woman but simply as two people, the facades slipping away. As the camera pulls back, however, we see the two lovers fall back into their performances of masculinity and femininity as Eddie asks Gonda to fetch her dress from the couch and Gonda lifts chairs above his head to impress her.
Another moment of unmasking occurs in Guevara’s apartment, where Eddie and her young artist friends watch his latest avant-garde film and smoke marijuana. After the film, the group dances and plays strip games. The energy in the room builds until the group seems to move as a single organism, driven by the same frenetic, unbridled joy. With everyone in their underwear and the haze of smoke on the camera lens, it is challenging to tell who is cisgender and how everyone presents themselves. “Who cares?” the film seems to ask. Individual identity melts away, the collective acceptance of one another becoming the new focus.
The film itself wears disguises, constantly reminding its audience of the inherent falseness of film and fiction. In another scene, Eddie is taken home by an American patron of the bar where she works. Their sex scene is filmed in much the same way as Eddie and Gonda, with balletic camera movements and intimate close-ups. A hand grips the bedsheets. Lips graze one another. “Cut!” Matsumoto yells, and the camera pulls out to show the crew surrounding the bed with their clipboards and boom microphones. Pîtâ writhes alone on the bed in mock pleasure. The scene cuts to a close-up of Pîtâ, with Matsumoto using his clapboard to announce the take.“I just do whatever the director tells me to do,” Pîtâ responds when asked about the love scenes. Matsumoto challenges his own fiction through these breaks in form. After all, isn’t a story just another mask? Isn’t Eddie just a disguise that Pîtâ wears?
"Funeral Parade of Roses" seeks to lift the veils that hide us and break down the dichotomies that bind us. Eddie’s episode in the art gallery exemplifies this ethos. Like any successful performer, she has become the mask. She runs and hides from her trauma; her father leaving her as a child and her mother’s blood on her hands. She has perfected the performance such that she can no longer tell where her visage ends and her true self begins. As the monotone voice in the gallery reminds Eddie of her facades, she is forced to confront what is underneath. In the film’s final scene, Eddie and Gonda make love for the final time. As Eddie is showering, Gonda absentmindedly begins looking through her book collection. He picks up her childhood journal and a photo falls out. It is Eddie as a young child with her parents, her father’s face burned away by her spiteful mother’s cigarette.
Gonda recognizes himself as the man with no face and Eddie as the little boy sitting next to him. Realizing the gravity of what they have done, he takes his own life with a ceremonial dagger in Eddie’s apartment. Upon seeing Gonda dying and the photo in his hand, Eddie comes to the same disturbing realization. Unable to cope, she takes the knife from his other hand and stabs her eyes, the Oedipal prophecy fulfilled. Both the wound and the dagger, the victim and the executioner, Eddie finally sheds her masks, the howling void behind them piercing through the celluloid that contains her.
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