• Fritz Lang’s Harakiri / Madame Butterfly 

11/24/24 (Sun)

I was surprised to find a foreign film called Harakiri at all given Kobayashi Masaki’s masterwork by the same English title, but this was in fact a silent German film made in 1918, when Europe was still in the midst of its Japonisme boom. On top of that, it’s based explicitly on Puccini’s Madame Butterfly, which debuted just a few years earlier (the US release used the opera title rather than the more sensational German title). It follows a US silent Butterfly film with Mary Pickford by just three years and is one of the earliest surviving works by the great Fritz Lang. I initially watched a poorly preserved hour-long version online but found a better 90-minute version the next day and re-watched it.

As with the US rendering, the show takes significant liberties with the text. The Butterfly character is renamed Otake (meaning bamboo). Here the villain is the powerful Bonze, a minor figure in the opera but blown up here to an evil character right out of a Kabuki drama. Otake is a daimyo’s daughter who the Bonze wants as a priestess. When the father refuses to force his daughter to take the position against her will, the priest slanders him to the Mikado, who then orders the man to kill himself. He does so by slicing open his stomach (off-screen) with a small sword, which Otake subsequently holds as a keepsake. The Bonze abducts her and locks her up, but she escapes to a pleasure house, where she begins to work as a geisha. It’s there that she meets a foreign naval officer, here a Dane named Olaf Anderson. He marries her, then returns to his country without knowing that Otake is pregnant. Several years later, just when the state declares her abandoned and threatens to take her son away, Olaf shows up again – but with a wife. When the wife hears about the child, she is incensed at Olaf’s disregard for both his son and the mother, and goes to Otake to convince her to hand over the son so that he may be raised in Europe. As in the opera, Otake is first shocked and then depressed, leading her to commit suicide with her father’s sword.

The many cultural inaccuracies in the piece aren’t even worth going into other than the utter misrepresentation of Buddhism. Puccini was bad enough in seeing the priest as a malevolent figure dooming the girl for converting to Christianity, but here the Bonze actually takes a role in killing the father and enslaving the girl. The bad-guy role thus shifts from the foreign admiral to the Japanese Buddhist priest. In this version, the marriage is only set for 999 days, and the girl is considered abandoned if the husband does not return in four years, meaning she will have to return to the Yoshiwara pleasure quarters. That will allow the priest to take her as the priestess of the Holy Forest. There is some confusion in terms of the time period, since samurai and foreigners wouldn’t be coexisting so casually in any era. The show really only works in Meiji times when samurai would have been prohibited, though the mixture does allow for spectacular visuals.

The director spared no expense on the sets and costumes, which appear fairly authentic. The river scene celebrating the entirely invented Festival of Falling Leaves was especially beautiful. The cast, on the other hand, was all-Caucasian as far as I could see, which will make it a punching bag these days. The acting was par for silent films.

This is not a great film or a major Lang work, and its portrayal of Japan is laughable. Still, it offers strong visuals and, for all its flaws, is certainly an imaginative recreation of the iconic piece.