• バイバイラブ (Bye Bye Love)

7/4/26 (Sat)

A gender-bending piece of 1974 by Fujisawa Isao, his only feature movie after stints as assistant director to Hiroshi Teshigahara (on Woman in the Dunes and The Face of Another, no less) and on yakuza films. I can see the influence of the former in the slipperiness of identity, and Bonnie and Clyde is an obvious inspiration (others frequently mention Pierrot le Fou, which I haven’t seen). It’s not the first Japanese film with an overtly gay character – the wild Funeral Parade of Roses beat it by five years – but it has an arresting take on the subject. While the film was apparently a relative success at the time, it had been thought lost for years and was only rediscovered in 2022.

A young, randy drifter who calls himself Utamaro, presumably after the ukiyoe artist, encounters an enigmatic woman who he gives the weird nickname Giko (more properly spelled Giiko). Thus, from the start we do not know their names or backgrounds. They are both nihilistic to the extreme. He literally runs into her when she is escaping from what she calls a masher. As she hurries on, he trips the pursuer, only to find that it is a policeman – and that she is in fact a shoplifter. He is arrested for abetting an escape, but manages to knock the policeman down and rob his gun. He then catches up with the woman, for whom he feels a strange attraction. When they inevitably sleep together, Utamaro discovers that the strange woman is in fact a man. Utamaro is unable to carry on, but unlike the similar scene in The Crying Game, he is apathetic enough to show no real reaction. When her American boyfriend, an embassy worker (outrageously named Nixon, president at the time), comes home and finds them in bed, he pulls out a gun – and is shot instead by Utamaro. Now the couple are fugitives. And the race is on.

Utamaro is attracted to Giko but not sexually. He asks why she can’t be a woman, and thinks at one point that maybe he should become a “faggot” (okama), not meant as an insult under the circumstances. Discovering that Giko is a virgin, he hires a woman to try to give him experience, and they end up in a bizarre three-way involving electrical shocks from radio wiring. The nudity makes clear that Giko is no woman (they really could have shaved the stray hairs from his nipples).

They each steal a car and arrange to meet in the northern town of Aomori at a movie theater playing a film with tough-guy Takakura Ken. Giko says that they themselves are like a threesome, with his male self (俺), female self (私) and Utamaro. The police catch up with Utamaro and blow him away, giving him his Clyde moment. Giko, presumably having learned about this from the news, goes to an airport and flies to an undisclosed location, where she goes into disguise as a man with a vow to become Utamaro 2, subverting her psychological sex for her biological sex. Having, in her own words, stolen so much from Utamaro, she now takes his very identity. Her final words are, “Goodbye, Utamaro.”

They each call themselves “nobodies”. When Giko says she doesn’t understand Utamaro, he tells her that he’s nothing but what he seems, i.e., all surface and nothing inside. Their nihilism is inherited from Sun Tribe films and amplified by similar trends in US films like Badlands.

Neither of the main actors was a true pro. The actor playing Giko was master of a bar in Golden Gai, where the director stumbled upon him, while the other was in a small theater troupe with little experience. That worked out nicely in natural and convincing performances. (The actress in the threesome was a soft porn actress.) Giko’s voice was dubbed by a woman.

The film supposedly explores the question of sexuality and trans-ness, but in this telling, Japan seems quite tolerant. The hired woman does express disgust at the idea of gays (muttering, “You guys are fags? Disgusting”), but she carries on anyway. Given that the protagonists have no names or backgrounds and that Giko is sexually fluid (willing to go back to being a man at the end), the theme seems to be more about identity. A chaotic but interesting flick.