Homoeroticism, honour codes, and the least festive “Merry Christmas” ever recorded.
This week’s pick looks like a seasonal warm hug by title alone, but it’s actually a POW-camp psychodrama where Christmas is basically just another opportunity for humiliation, beatings, and cultural misunderstanding.
The core triangle
- Lawrence (Tom Conti): the cultural bridge. He respects Japan’s traditions more than the other prisoners do, but still can’t square the camp’s brutality with the language of “honour.”
- Celliers (David Bowie): quiet defiance, charisma, scars, and a refusal to surrender mentally even when physically broken.
- Yonoi (Ryūichi Sakamoto): the commander whose obsession with honour is also clearly entangled with fascination/desire — especially towards Celliers — and whose self-loathing (the “missed coup / lost honour” backstory) bleeds into how he runs the camp.
What the film is really doing
This isn’t a “war movie” in the guns-and-heroics sense. It’s a study of shame and power:
- The Japanese guards are trapped by their own code: surrender is incomprehensible, confession is weakness, punishment is “order.”
- The prisoners are trapped by their code: resistance is identity, humiliation is poison, compromise looks like collaboration.
- And between them is Lawrence, trying to keep men alive with language — while knowing language isn’t enough.
The flashback that explains everything
Celliers’ confession about failing to protect his younger brother (and the brutal boarding-school initiation) is where the film stops being “about the camp” and becomes “about the kind of violence men normalise.” That shame mirrors Yonoi’s shame. Different cultures, same wound.
The moments you won’t forget
- The mock execution: Bowie refusing the blindfold because it’s “for them.”
- The Christmas scene: Hara drunk on sake, Lawrence spared, and the phrase that becomes the film’s ghost.
- The public kiss: Celliers’ desperate, weaponised tenderness to stop an execution — the emotional bomb that breaks Yonoi.
- The ending, years later: Lawrence visiting Hara, now the condemned man, and the final line delivered with a tragic calm:
“Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence.”
Verdict
Not festive. Not cosy. Not easy. But brilliantly acted, quietly devastating, and still unusually forward-thinking in how it frames desire, masculinity, and shame without turning it into cheap scandal.
If you want tinsel: watch Elf.
If you want a Christmas film that leaves a bruise: this is the one.
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