![]() ![]() ![]() This is a ‘Let’s Dance’-era Bowie, with sharp teeth, tanned skin and peroxide hair. The roster of celebrities has a strange effect on everything. He spars with Kitano, who plays a sort of Japanese Falstaff, a violent boozehound prone to flares of largesse. Then there’s Lawrence, sensitive and bilingual, constantly shuttling between the two cultures and trying to translate their values. ![]() And as the plot develops, they pull him apart. He’s obsessed with two things: bushido and Bowie. Captain Yonoi, the camp’s commandant, is from the warrior class. And each of these struggles is embodied in the battle of wills of two pairs of officers: Jack Celliers (Bowie) and Captain Yonoi (Ryuichi Sakamoto) and John Lawrence (Tom Conti) and Sergeant Hara (Kitano).īowie plays an upper-crust enigma, a paratrooper who defies authority in typically unorthodox ways like eating flowers and leading sing-a-longs. East versus West, patriotism versus pragmatism, guilt versus shame. It’s a story about forgiveness and understanding between cultures. It’s a story about East-West relations that plays out in the microcosm of a Japanese PoW camp in Java. At heart the film seems sweetly, naively simple. ![]()
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