Fifty years on, Toshio Matsumoto’s monochrome masterpiece still seems like a chilling message from the future
Toshio Matsumoto’s 1969 film is a fusillade of haunted images and traumatised glimpses, splattered across a realist melodrama of the Tokyo underground club scene, played out in a fiercely beautiful monochrome. (It is reissued as part of the BFI’s
Japan 2020 season which has now been forced to migrate to streaming until cinemas reopen.)
Eddie, played by the then-unknown performer Pîtâ, is a transgender bar hostess and rising star of a place named the Genet – Matsumoto leaves it up to us to ponder the associations. Eddie is having a passionate affair with the club’s owner, Gonda (played by Kurosawa regular Yoshio Tsuchiya), and has ignited the passionate rage and jealousy of Gonda’s other lover and employee, the transgender hostess, Leda (Osamu Ogasawara). As their love triangle proceeds to its operatic conclusion, Matsumoto gives us perspectives on the subliminal flashes of horror that flicker across the film’s retina. Eddie has had a tragic relationship with her parents, a quasi-Oedipal nightmare that involves violence to both.