Fantasia 2020: Tezuka’s Barbara
Osamu Tezuka, famed manga writer, released the most outwardly mature of his works, Barbara, in 1973. That story, adapted by his son, director Macoto Tezuka, into the film Tezuka's Barbara, traces the psychosexual descent of writer Yosuke Mikura (Gorô Inagaki), an author of great renown. Yosuke is courted by a politician (Ryôsuke Ohtani) who wants to use Mikura's fame to his advantage and marry off his daughter (Moemi Katayama) to Mikura. Meanwhile, Mikura has taken in the vagrant Barbara (Fumi Nikaido) who seems in a perpetual state of delirious inebriation, like Mikura. Mikura, however, is also in a perpetual state of sexual frustration, directing his impulses at inanimate objects and animals. Early in the film, Barbara finds Mikura writhing in a state of hallucinatory ecstasy with what is, comically, revealed to be a mannequin. She always seems to find him in such compromising states, acting as the moral compass to his increasingly debauched visions.
This is Tezuka's Barbara's best narrative trick. Over and over again, Mikura's leering, lascivious gaze is re-oriented and re-examined and, by the end, savagely stripped bare to reveal the consumptive, possessive, perverse impulse that it is. There is little romantic about the writer's romanticism, and Macoto Tezuka is relentless in his deconstruction of it. Tezuka frames the film as a neo-noir from the outset, with world-weary reflective narration, as though recounting a half-forgotten dream. The jazzy soundtrack tumbles through scenes lending the whole picture a freeform, but classically noir atmosphere. And, like those classic noir tales, protection—obsessive protection—of their women-in-need is revealed to be predatory and self-serving.
The film returns to sex, Mikura's obsession with it and fantasies of it, over and over, to an almost comical extent. One sex scene ends only for it to begin anew, moments later, as the sun rises. It's excessive and seems almost juvenilely drawn-out at first. Another sex scene erupts literal seconds after he has met the woman. But, it quickly becomes obvious that this is the point. Mikura is lost in his fantasies, quite literal fantasies as they are, because this is the only place he can exert total, consumptive control over his base, carnal desires. In the classic noir, the hero often rebukes these sexual advances for feigned anxiety about the safety of his lover; until he gives in, consumed by lust. The moment of capitulation is both a loss of control and an exertion of one, for the romance is often violent and possessive in an attempt to emphasize the instability of the hero, despite his inherent goodness. Mikura knows no such restraint. But, he also never knows true intimacy. Tezuka withholds this release from Mikura over and over, before ripping the rug out from beneath him when he is allowed a moment of lustful embrace.
The third act of this twisty narrative is where Mikura's writing begins to topple, ever so slightly, before righting itself in the climax. The film takes a detour to an Eyes Wide Shut-esque ceremony that, while a wonderfully and cinematically reflexive detour, feels unnecessary. It grinds the momentum to a halt and sets up a thread that won't be paid off until the very end. By then, the film uses it to springboard off to a moment that, while necessary emotionally, could have been achieved through a more direct, less contrived route. I'm glad the film ends where it does. It reinforces, quite starkly, the themes that have been slowly brewing for roughly two hours. But, when Tezuka's Barbara is at the peak of its narrative inertia, it slams on the brakes and hops to another lane. Some won't mind it for its freshness and deviation in tone and palette. I found it a bit confounding and detrimental to the overall pacing.
Nevertheless, Tezuka's Barbara is a sublimely introspective and deconstructive examination of gumshoe protagonists. I wish its visual style were more evocative, and its final act tidier. But, this is a worthwhile shakeup of genre convention with expressive performances that do wonders to breathe life into their respective archetypes before they are thoroughly stripped bare and exposed. If you are hungering for something playful and freeform with the conviction to seriously interrogate its own themes and tradition, Tezuka's Barbara is a fine way to spend an evening.
