Film Reviews

GOHATTO (Taboo)

Being from the veteren writer / director of the David Bowie staring prisioner of war film ‘Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence’ Gohatto was always going to be a unique experience but watching Nagisa Oshima’s film is like stepping into some kind of opaque homo-erotic 19th century samurai dream.

After winning selection to the exclusive Shinsengumi training school, a newly formed elite samurai guard formed to protect the Shoguns, the impossibly angelic-looking 18 year old Sozaburo Kano, stoically portrayed by film debutant Ryuhei Matsuda, arouses more interest in his physical appearance than his unqualified sword fighting abilities. Within days he is in the midst of an affair with the only other new recruit Hyozo Tashiro, (Tadanobu Asano) stirring the desires of his fellow students and officers alike, all the more eager to get him into the bedroom as much as the training room. Like the Greeks and Roman warriors, who better to go into battle with than your lover? Almost ashamed by his natural ability Kano deliberately plays down his fighting skills but when his sparring technique is ridiculed by a pair of intruders he and his older counterpart, whose dignity he was protecting, risk death and banishment from the school to set out to avenge the deep insult. It is up to the school’s stern master, Captain Toshizo (Takeshi Kitano), to decide if the young Kano must follow the strict samurai code or be allowed to follow his own unique path.

Forbidden love, revenge, betrayal, monologues, rituals, ceremony and traditions, if Shakespeare had written a martial arts play it would have been something like this. It even has a Macbeth styled misty moonlit swamp bathed in bold artificial deep blue light for a climax, which, like the rest of the film being shot entirely in a Tokyo studio, adds to the uniqueness of the piece, inspiring The Bride’s epic fight with O-Ren Ishii in Tarantino’s Kill Bill Vol 1.

100 minutes. Japan 1999.

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