Shogun-era Japan. 1865. Young Kano Sozaburo is admitted to an elite samurai academy. As the twentieth century approaches, Samurai traditions wane, reformist forces busy knocking on doors.
"Taboo" was directed by Nagisa Oshima, a director renowned for the sexually explicit "Realm of the Senses". Because of this some have claimed that "Taboo" is another film "about sexuality", specifically Sozaburo's homosexuality (Sozaburo isn't gay), but this isn't quite true. Sozaburo, with his androgynous features, navigates Oshima's film like a vacant object of desire. In Lacanian theory he'd be typically termed an "objet petit a", whose mere appearance prompts the need for some secret to be explained. But though he's a beautiful man and obviously quite skilled as a swordsman, every student and superior at the academy finds themselves vying for Sozaburo's affections not because of what Sozaburo is or possesses, but because of what they project onto him. Love, then, is revealed to be defined by the imagination, more akin to a fetish. This is typical of Oshima. Oshima's aesthetic seductions then become Sozaburo's, the film tricking you into partaking in an array of obsessions, before it reveals how all these attractions to Sozaburo are exploitative at worst, unconscious narcissistic impulses at best. These affections range from courtly love, to longings from afar, to mutual beneficial attractions to outright rape (and a bevy of other complex relationships), but in each case the point is the same. They are taboos because permission is never sought.
The "Taboo" of the film's title is thus not homosexuality (and Oshima practically says this blatantly in interviews). Indeed, homosexuality was openly accepted in the Imperial militia. The taboo is violence, with primacy given to psychic or metaphysical violence. This is what prompts Sozaburo to seek physical revenge. On one hand he's your archetypal "mysterious, vengeful stranger with a hidden past", on another he's taking a vow to pay back the world for its "taboo of aesthetics", of its "surfaces" and "pretense". For Sozaburo, "love", and the appreciation of beauty in general, is a veiled, violent thing. Love is a primordial act of violence, the privileging of one object at the expense of another. Indeed, Sozaburo, a deeply embittered and scarred man, is able to bait men precisely because he now views love as a barren transaction of signs (he becomes the male version of past Oshima "heroes"), signs which he has now vengefully resolved to control (in this regard observe how he refuses to cut his hair; his fringe has strong cultural connotations in Japanese culture). Of course Sozaburo's contempt, while not necessarily wrong, isn't the whole story. Pretense, or pretending, is paradoxically central to compassion (the "putting oneself in another's place", the "let's pretend" impulse of children and art).
Oshima then broadens the film such that life in the academy serves as a microcosm for late nineteenth century Japan. The film takes place during a period of time in which the shogunate had taken control of the nation from the emperor. The Shinsengumi, a samurai militia serving the shogunate, then began recruiting new members from the peasant class. You thus had a situation where peasants were essentially tasked with keeping peasants under control. As social order is subject to human urges, such order obviously proved difficult. Typical of Oshima, we then reach a bizarre, ironic situation in which any indecency is permitted, be it homosexuality or murder, in order to maintain public decency. Oshima then clashes the highly aestheticized culture of Japan with Japan's brutal, martial code of the warrior. In this regard Sozaburo becomes an aesthetic object, an almost porcelain work of art, who's beauty triggers a bevy of suppressed and twisted emotions in the psyche of Japanese culture. He lays bare poeticized violence (symbolised through the film by cherry blossoms and cut trees).
Incidentally, because he suffered a stroke (his second stroke) after "Taboo's" release, Oshima is unlikely to ever release another film. While "Taboo" is a major work by Oshima, its aesthetic – call it "mannerist poeticism" - has been rendered kitsch by countless post-Mizoguchi, post-Kurosawa, post-Ozu etc film-makers, and countless samurai films and anime/manga. Of course you can argue that this is precisely the point. With his silky kimonos, his cherry blossoms, his opulent sets, Oshima is hoping to serve up a kind of "samurai romanticism" that gradually reveals itself to be hackneyed. It works theoretically rather than visually, depending how familiar you are with samurai movies.
8.5/10 – See Claire Denis' "Beau Travail". Two viewings required.
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