Japanese director Nagisa Oshima, of “In the Realm of the Senses,” may be a cinematic tiger grown old, but his latest film, “Taboo” (“Gohatto”), shows that he hasn’t lost his bite. A sometimes hypnotically beautiful tale of gay samurai in the 19th Century it’s the work of a filmmaker still capable of provocation and dazzling poetry.
The movie is set in Kyoto in 1865, in the world of a picked samurai troop. At the film’s center is a brilliant teenage recruit, Sazuburo Kano (Ryuhei Matsuda), a devastating swordsman who also possesses a bewitching, androgynous beauty. Like an evil angel passively disrupting the spartan severity of the barracks, Kano is continually obsessed over by the men around him. His main affair is with the other top young recruit, the more macho, sullen Hyozo Tashiro (Tadanobu Asanu).
Using ellipsis, radically leaping over events, stitching the movie together with intertitles, Oshima switches the focus early on from the young lovers to the cynical old Capt. Toshizo Hijikata (played by Japanese superstar Beat Takeshi, a.k.a. Takeshi Kitano) and the militia’s top soldier, Lt. Soji Okita (Shinji Takeda). As they watch, a timeless romance of desire, treachery, bloodshed and tragedy is enacted by Kano and Toshiro. Their passion — which, for all we see, may never have been consummated — infects or alters the entire machismo-drenched barracks. For Oshima, homosexuality is not necessarily an intrusion in the samurai milieu but an element constantly present though not openly expressed.
At the center of this sexual-emotional vortex is Kitano’s Capt. Hijikata, with his morose face and haunted eyes. He gives Hijikata a quiet, brooding intensity that, not for the first time, suggests a Japanese Bogart: vulnerable, tough and mysterious all at once.
The movie is sensuous without being coy, lyrical without being precious. And Oshima, as always, has no qualms about shattering taboos — as in the undisguised sex scenes of “Realm of the Senses” or the love affair of a British socialite (Charlotte Rampling) and a monkey in his last feature, “Max My Love.” Here, though, he is more discreet. The movie is less about the affair than the shock waves in its wake.
“Taboo” is both austere and violent — filled with the slash and clang of the swords, the sight of swordsmen circling each other like jungle cats. And it’s gorgeous, with costumes by Emi Wada (“Ran”) and stunning, nerve-jangling electronic music by Ryuchi Sakamoto (“The Last Emperor”). Throughout, the story remains ambivalent. The beauty is disturbing, the sexuality leads to death, and eventually we begin to see the samurai code as secretly embracing both. “Taboo’s last image — a cherry tree sent crashing to earth by Hijikata — is poetic and savage, an explosion of emotions held too long in check.
That repression finally becomes intensely moving. The center of “Taboo” may be the younger samurai, butit’s an old man’s film, infused with passion, discretion, despair and a serenity the younger Oshima (of “Death by Hanging” and “Diary of a Shinjuku Thief”) rarely showed. Since writing “Taboo,” the now 68-year-old Oshima had a stroke; but there’s no visible slackening. The visuals, the ideas, the mood, the audacity — all these are pure Oshima. A poetic movie about machismo, romance and death, “Taboo” is one of the strangest of all samurai films and one of the most memorable.
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Opens Friday at The Music Box Theatre. Running time: 1:41. No MPAA rating (adult: sensuality and violence). Japanese, subtitled. (star)(star)(star) 1/2
