Funerals, Drag Queens, and Sequential Deaths. It Is Indeed a Parade of Roses.
Funeral Parade of Roses Movie Review
Living the life ambiguous religion, there’s only a trifecta of existing gods in my life — Yohji Yamamoto, Yorgos Lanthimos, and RuPaul Charles — I’ve been putting into consideration to include Stanley Kubrick’s name. Aside from his paradisiac films that opened doors of influences of today’s pop culture, learning Funeral Parade of Roses from him is the last straw not to include his name on my daily blasphemous prayers.
Watching this film is like a late eulogy to Matsumoto Toshio.
It seems like I missed a lot of opportunities to know things about him while he’s alive, yet again, after watching this film, I blanked out and forgot his recent death. It is the body named ’Matsumoto Toshio’ who cease to exist last twelfth of April this year, and not the identity of filmmaker, Matsumoto Toshio.
God, how I loved him.
Funeral Parade of Roses is a compilation of shock art videos exhibited in a lights out contemporary art gallery. A reminiscent of my past visit at Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s The Serenity of Madness. How it was indeed a parade of roses in the form of sequential requiems. Yet the term ‘contemporary’ is subjected into individual opinions. This film is not existing in the world where everyone is a slave of time and expiring implications, it is living outside everything — where compromises are like oil to its proverbial water.
The richness of culture portrayed in Funeral Parade of Roses, especially the 70s gay culture in Japan, was embossed in every possible way — with its artistry and queerness that is not exaggerated nor lessened, Matsumoto even used real drag queens to take the role of his characters. Every symbolisms used in the film was not even hidden by the naked eye; it is placed in each frames deliberately, noticing us and whispering its own tale without waiting for the viewer to play its own guessing game.
May I mention how advance and articulate the thinking behind this film that you can effortlessly line this up with today’s arthouse movies?
One viewing can be considered as blasphemous. Actually, one review is not enough. This film is rich with relative knowledge, outside influences worth noting, and inclinations that can’t be immediately seen at one glance.
I might even consider this as the film closest to Matsumoto Toshio’s heart.
Funeral Parade of Roses immediately became one of my favourite films of all time without any second thought. I am always a sucker for movies that can give their characters the deepest gushes of flaws, making them more humane in comparison with other works that still clueless on how malleable humanity is.
It’s not about the idea of being ‘alive’, but how it seems like he never actually lived outside his films. In the end, it went beyond astonishing me, and probably, with a lot of faith in hand, it will do more than what I expect.
