Max mon amour (1986)

This is a very weird and unpleasant film, although there is no violence. Charlotte Rampling when younger, with her intensely blue lizard eyes, withers the camera about a hundred times, each gaze a dagger point. The lighting is so flat and so over-bright that one needs sunglasses to watch the film anyway. Nagisa Oshima, as writer and director, decided to make a satirical film, but he carried satire way over the edge and down the cliff. A small man or boy dressed up in a monkey suit impersonates a chimpanzee ('sham-pon-zay' if you are French), and has an affair with Charlotte Rampling. Her husband finds out, is insanely jealous, but according to the Parisian code in such things, ends up inviting the chimp, called Max, to stay in his house, where his wife and Max have their trysts in a private bedroom. Max sits at the dining table with them at dinner time, tearing apart his bananas, while the husband asks his wife agonising questions about the details of her sex acts with the chimp. It sounds funny but it is not. Rampling plays it icily straight, and rubs lips with the monkey suit and coos endearments into Max's ear, while her husband looks on. Yes, it is a satire. No, it is too bizarre and unsettling to be amusing. But I think that's what the director wanted, and was only pretending to make a farcical comedy. In fact, he was attacking marriage, manners, love, affairs, mistresses, lovers, Western codes of behaviour, formality, and our bestial natures. But where does Oshima's own nature fit in to all this? Someone should make a scathing satirical film about the Japanese sometime, who I suspect may be even more bizarre in their daily lives than this film is in its wildest fantasies. On the other hand, Oshima did make an attack on the Japanese militarists in his 1983 film 'Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence', so I guess he was just balancing things out, lashing out in both directions. Which reminds me: did you hear the one about the Japanese plastic surgeon? He could Nip but he couldn't tuck.