Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence
The story takes place on a film set in Java at a Japanese POW camp in 1942. It is about a complex relationship between a rebellious prisoner, David Bowie and camp commandant Ryuichi Sakomoto who is obsessed by Bowie's attitude.
17 November 1939, Kobe, Japan
15 June 1928
16 March 1948, Manawatu, New Zealand
1961
27 May 1955, Osaka, Japan
18 January 1947, Tokyo, Japan
31 August 1940, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia
July 30, 2003
Fine performances by Conti, Takeshi (brilliant in his first dramatic role), Sakamoto (a Japanese pop star in his film acting debut who also contributed the memorable score), and Bowie enhance this provocative film.
July 23, 2003
A compelling cross-cultural study of friendship and bravery
May 24, 2003
A memorable story of understanding across cultures.
October 01, 2010
It's relentlessly grim, constantly off-balance, occasionally moving, and often striking.
October 23, 2004
Here's a movie that is even stranger than it was intended to be.
October 12, 2010
The film’s attention is split fairly evenly across the major characters, and their interactions are consistently fascinating in the way they illustrate both the cultural divide and the halting attempts to somehow bridge it.
August 30, 2004
Mr. Oshima has staged the film in a spacious tropical setting and filled it with a great number of extras. Even so, Mr. Bowie always stands out from the crowd.
October 02, 2008
From Oshima's later career... most notable is this bilingual, end-of-WWII tearjerker about forgiveness and understanding between cultures, which could have been dubbed The Man Who Fell to Java.
May 01, 2008
David Bowie is outstanding as the defiant British prisoner whose erotic appeal undoes the Japanese commandant, played by Sakamoto, who was at the height of his fame as a musical icon in Japan
June 24, 2006
For all the praise heaped upon Oshima's admittedly ambitious film about East-West relations in the microcosm of a Japanese PoW camp during World War II, it's far less satisfactory than most of his earlier work.
January 01, 2000
The context and frequent incontinence of the execution bring the film uncomfortably close to the pseudophilosophical bondage fantasies of Yukio Mishima.
December 10, 2008
The Merry Christmas catalogue of atrocities finally becomes numbing, even ludicrous.
