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Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence (Japanese: 戦場のメリークリスマス, Hepburn: Senjō no Merī Kurisumasu, 'Merry Christmas on the Battlefield'), also known in many European editions as Furyo (俘虜, Japanese for "prisoner of war"),[3] is a 1983 war film co-written and directed by Nagisa Ōshima, co-written by Paul Mayersberg, and produced by Jeremy Thomas. The film is based on the experiences of Sir Laurens van der Post (portrayed by Tom Conti) as a prisoner of war in Japan during World War II, as depicted in his books The Seed and the Sower (1963) and The Night of the New Moon (1970). It stars David Bowie, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Takeshi Kitano and Jack Thompson; Sakamoto also wrote the score and the vocal theme "Forbidden Colours", which features David Sylvian.

Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence
Japanese theatrical release poster
Directed by	Nagisa Ōshima
Screenplay by	Nagisa Ōshima Paul Mayersberg
Based on	The Seed and the Sower by Sir Laurens van der Post
Produced by	Jeremy Thomas
Starring	David Bowie Tom Conti Ryuichi Sakamoto Takeshi Kitano Jack Thompson
Cinematography	Toichiro Narushima
Edited by	Tomoyo Ōshima
Music by	Ryuichi Sakamoto
Production companies	National Film Trustee Company Antares-Nova N.V. Recorded Picture Company Oshima Productions Asahi National Broadcasting Broadbank Investments
Distributed by	Shochiku Fuji Nippon Herald Films (Japan) Palace Pictures (United Kingdom)
Release dates	10 May 1983 (1983-05-10) (Cannes) 28 May 1983 (1983-05-28) (Japan) 25 August 1983 (1983-08-25) (United Kingdom)
Running time	123 minutes
Countries	Japan[1] United Kingdom New Zealand[2]
Languages	English Japanese
Box office	¥990 million (Japan rentals) $2.3 million (USA) 2.8 million tickets (overseas)

The film was entered into the 1983 Cannes Film Festival in competition for the Palme d'Or.[4] Sakamoto's score won the film a BAFTA Award for Best Film Music.

Plot

In 1942, Captain Yonoi is the commander of a POW camp in Japanese-occupied Java. A strict adherent to the bushido code, his only sources of connection to the prisoners lie in the empathetic Lt. Col. John Lawrence, the only inmate fluent in Japanese, and the abrasive spokesman Gp. Capt. Hicksley, who repeatedly resists Yonoi's attempts to find weapons experts among the prisoners for the Japanese army's interests. Lawrence has befriended Sgt. Gengo Hara, but remains at odds with the rest of the staff. Summoned to the military trial of the recently-captured Major Jack Celliers, Yonoi is fascinated by his resilience and has him interned at the camp. After the trial, Yonoi confides with Lawrence that he is haunted with shame due to his absence during the February 26 Incident, believing he should've died alongside the rebels and implying that his focus on honor stems from this. Sensing a kindred spirit in Celliers, Yonoi's fascination grows into a romantic obsession: he treats him specially, watches him sleep, and repeatedly asks Hara about him in private.

When the inmates are made to fast as punishment for insubordination during the forced seppuku of a guard (Okura), Celliers sneaks in food. The guards catch him and find a smuggled radio during the subsequent investigation, forcing him and Lawrence to take the blame. Yonoi's batman, realizing the hold Celliers has on him, attempts to kill Celliers in his sleep that night, but fails after he wakes up and escapes, freeing Lawrence too. Yonoi catches Celliers and challenges him to a duel in exchange for his freedom, but Celliers refuses; the batman returns and commits suicide for his failure, urging Yonoi to kill Celliers before his feelings overpower him. At the funeral, Lawrence learns that he and Celliers will be executed for the radio, despite the lack of evidence, to preserve order in the camp; enraged, he trashes the funeral set and is forced back into his cell. That night, Celliers reveals to Lawrence that as a teenager, he betrayed his younger brother, long bullied for his hunchback, by refusing to spare him a humiliating and traumatizing initiation ritual at their boarding school. Confronting his past, he describes the lifelong shame he felt towards his actions, paralleling Yonoi's predicament. During their conversation, the pair are released by a drunken Hara, as a different prisoner confessed to delivering the radio. As they leave, Hara calls out in English, "Merry Christmas, Lawrence!" Although Yonoi is angry at Hara for exceeding his authority, he only mildly reprimands him.

Hicksley, realizing that Yonoi wants to replace him with Celliers as spokesman, confronts him. The two argue over their withholding of information from one another before an enraged Yonoi orders the whole camp to form up outside the barracks, including the sick bay's ailing patients, resulting in one's death. Hicksley, who refused to bring out the patients, is to be punished for his insubordination with an on-the-spot execution. Before he can be killed, however, Celliers breaks rank and kisses Yonoi on each cheek, choosing to save Hicksley's life at the cost of his own. Caught between a desire for vindication and his feelings for Celliers, a distraught Yonoi collapses and is ultimately relieved from duty. His more rigid replacement has Celliers buried in the sand up to his neck and left to die. Before leaving, Yonoi sneaks into his pen and cuts a lock from his hair, moments before his passing.

Four years later, Lawrence visits Hara, who is now a prisoner of the Allies. Hara has learned to speak English and reveals he is to be executed the following day for war crimes. Expressing confusion over the harshness of his sentence given how commonplace his actions were among both sides of the war, he and Lawrence both conclude that while the Allies officially won, morally "we are all wrong." The two reminisce on Celliers and Yonoi, the latter of whom was reported to have been killed after the war, before bidding each other goodbye. As he is leaving, Hara calls out, "Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence!".

Cast

• David Bowie as Maj. Jack "Strafer" Celliers
  • Chris Broun as Jack Celliers (aged 12)
• Tom Conti as Lt. Col. John Lawrence
• Ryuichi Sakamoto as Capt. Yonoi
• Takeshi Kitano as Sgt. Gengo Hara
• Jack Thompson as Gp. Capt. Hicksley
• Johnny Okura as Kanemoto
• Alistair Browning as De Jong
• James Malcolm as Celliers' brother
• Yuya Uchida as Commandant of military prison
• Ryunosuke Kaneda as Colonel Fujimura, President of the Court
• Takashi Naitō as Lt. Iwata
• Yuji Honma as PFC. Yajima
• Tamio Ishikura as Prosecutor
• Rokko Toura as Interpreter
• Kan Mikami as Lt. Ito
• Hideo Murota as New commandant of the camp

Production

David Bowie was cast as Jack Celliers after director Nagisa Ōshima saw him in a production of The Elephant Man on Broadway. He felt that Bowie had "an inner spirit that is indestructible". While shooting the film, Bowie was amazed that Ōshima had a two- to three-acre camp built on the remote Polynesian island of Rarotonga, but most of the camp was never shot on film. He said Ōshima "only shot little bits at the corners. I kind of thought it was a waste, but when I saw the movie, it was just so potent – you could feel the camp there, quite definitely."[5] Bowie noted how Ōshima would give an incredible amount of direction to his Japanese actors ("down to the minutest detail"), but when directing him or fellow Westerner Tom Conti, he would say "Please do whatever it is you people do."[6] Bowie thought his performance in the film was "the most credible performance" he had done in a film up to that point in his career.[5]

The boarding school sequence was shot on location at King's College, a private high school in Auckland, New Zealand. In a shot of two students playing billiards, another boy in the room can be seen wearing a King's blazer. Other scenes were filmed in various locations around Auckland including Auckland Railway Station.[7]

Contrary to usual cinematic practice, Ōshima shot the film without rushes and shipped the film off the island with no safety prints. "It was all going out of the camera and down to the post office and being wrapped up in brown paper and sent off to Japan", Bowie stated. Ōshima's editor in Japan cut the movie into a rough print within four days of Ōshima returning to Japan.[5]

On set, David Bowie made a bond with his on-screen brother, James Malcolm, whom he later called his “New Zealand brother”. For one pivotal scene in the movie, Malcolm had to sing for Bowie. The next year, Bowie invited Malcolm to join him on stage at Western Springs in Auckland for the Serious Moonlight tour, where they released a dove together as a sign of peace.[8]

Soundtrack

Reception

Review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes gives Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence an 83% approval rating and an average rating of 6.40 out of 10 based on 24 reviews.[9]

The New York Times critic Janet Maslin wrote a favourable review,[10] saying that

David Bowie plays a born leader in Nagisa Ōshima's Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence, and he plays him like a born film star. Mr. Bowie's screen presence here is mercurial and arresting, and he seems to arrive at this effortlessly, though he manages to do something slyly different in every scene. The demands of his role may sometimes be improbable and elaborate, but Mr. Bowie fills them in a remarkably plain and direct way. Little else in the film is so unaffected or clear.

On the film's Japanese actors, Maslin wrote that

the two main Japanese characters who have brought [Lawrence] to this understanding are Sergeant Hara, a brutal figure who taunts Lawrence while also admiring him, and Captain Yonoi, the handsome young camp commander, who has a fierce belief in the samurai code. Both of these actors perform at an obvious disadvantage, since their English is awkward and the motives of their characters are imperfectly revealed. However, they can convey the complex affinity between captors and prisoners, a point that is made most touchingly in a brief postwar coda.

The Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa and the American director Christopher Nolan named Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence as among their favorite films.[11][12]

Box office

In Japan, the film earned ¥990 million in distributor rentals.[13] In the United States, it grossed $2,306,560 (equivalent to $6,300,000 in 2021).[14]

It sold 2,385,100 tickets in the United States, France and Sweden.[15] It also sold 423,778 tickets in Germany,[16] and 54 tickets in Switzerland and Spain since 2007,[17] for a combined 2,808,932 tickets sold in overseas territories outside of Japan and the United Kingdom.

See also

• List of Christmas films

References

External links

• Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence at IMDb
• Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence at Rotten Tomatoes
• Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence at the Japanese Movie Database (in Japanese)
• Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence at AllMovie
• Lawrence of Shinjuku: Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence an essay by Chuck Stephens at the Criterion Collection

На других языках

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[de] Furyo – Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence

Die britisch-japanische Filmkoproduktion Furyo – Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence entstand 1983 unter der Regie von Nagisa Ōshima nach der Buchvorlage The Seed and the Sower von Laurens van der Post. Der japanische Titel (戦場のメリークリスマス, Senjō no Merī Kurisumasu) bedeutet „Fröhliche Weihnachten auf dem Schlachtfeld“, der nur in Europa verwendete Titel Furyo (jap. 俘虜) bedeutet „Kriegsgefangener“. Nach einem Vierteljahrhundert Filmkarriere war es für Ōshima der erste Film, den er außerhalb Japans drehte. Dank seines Skandalerfolgs Im Reich der Sinne erhielt er ausreichend finanzielle Mittel, um den Kriegsfilm mit Starbesetzung innerhalb von 90 Tagen in Neuseeland und auf Rarotonga zu drehen. Der Film spielt während des Zweiten Weltkrieges. In einem Lager stehen britische Kriegsgefangene im Konflikt mit ihren japanischen Aufsehern. In den Hauptrollen spielen David Bowie, Ryūichi Sakamoto, Tom Conti und Takeshi Kitano.

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- [en] Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence

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[it] Furyo

Furyo è un film del 1983 diretto da Nagisa Oshima, tratto liberamente dal romanzo Il seme e il seminatore (The Seed and the Sower, 1963) dello scrittore sudafricano Laurens van der Post, nel quale l'autore raccontò della sua personale esperienza come prigioniero di guerra in un campo di concentramento giapponese durante la seconda guerra mondiale (su cui ha scritto anche A Bar of Shadow e The Night of the New Moon).

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[ru] Счастливого Рождества, мистер Лоуренс

«Счастливого Рождества, мистер Лоуренс» или «Весёлого Рождества, мистер Лоуренс» (англ. Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence) — кинофильм режиссёра Нагисы Осимы, вышедший на экраны в 1983 году. Главные роли исполнили Дэвид Боуи, Том Конти, Рюити Сакамото и Такэси Китано. Экранизация автобиографических романов «Семя и сеятель» (англ. The Seed And The Sower, 1963 г.) и «Ночь новолуния» (англ. The Night of the New Moon, 1970 г.) Лоренса ван дер Поста.

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