EXCLUSIVE LIMITED RUN! NEW 35MM PRINT!

We’re thrilled to have a new print, made in Japan, of Oshima’s late career triumph, an international co-production that briefly made his name, if not household, certainly recognizable to cinephiles and rock fans the world over. Long unavailable in Canada, Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence features two rock icons as arch-nemeses in a World War II POW camp in Java in 1942. David Bowie plays Celliers, an upper crust New Zealand major, responsible for the British POWs’ morale; Ryuichi Sakamoto, who contributed the film’s hypnotically spare music track, plays Yonoi, the fanatical camp commander whose Mishima-like obsession with hara-kiri is replaced by his growing fixation on his androgynous blonde prisoner. Sharing tea and a mystification with each other’s code of honour, the two joust over cultural differences, Orient vs Occident, their civility barely masking desire, until a series of incidents in the camp locks the commanders in direct conflict. Takeshi Kitano plays unhinged Sergeant Hara who utters the film’s famous title as he drunkenly impersonates Santa Claus. A sensation at the Cannes film festival, Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence has often been described as a “thinking man’s Bridge on the River Kwai,” and you can contrast and compare with the Lean epic, screening on December 6. “This is a spectacular, fascinating film” (David Thomson, The New York Times). “The final episode . . . is perhaps the most movingly melodramatic in all Oshima’s cinema” (Chuck Stephens, Film Comment).

Special ticket prices apply.