Cast overview, first billed only: | |||
Pîtâ | ... | Eddie | |
![]() |
Osamu Ogasawara | ... | Leda |
![]() |
Yoshimi Jô | ... | Jimi |
![]() |
Koichi Nakamura | ... | Juju |
![]() |
Flamenco Umeji | ... | Greco |
![]() |
Saako Oota | ... | Mari |
![]() |
Tarô Manji | ... | Nora |
![]() |
Toyosaburo Uchiyama | ... | Guevara |
![]() |
Mikio Shibayama | ... | Philosopher |
![]() |
Wataru Hikonagi | ... | Sabu |
![]() |
Fuchisumi Gomi | ... | Piro |
![]() |
Chieko Kobayashi | ... | Okei |
![]() |
Yô Satô | ... | Radon |
![]() |
Keiichi Takenaga | ... | Humpback |
![]() |
Mamoru Hirata |
While dealing drugs on the side, Gonda operates the Genet, a gay bar in Tokyo where he has hired a stable of transvestites to service the customers. The madame or lead "girl" of the bar is Leda, an older, old fashioned geisha-styled transvestite with who Gonda lives and is in a relationship. Arguably, the most popular of the girls working at the bar now is Eddie, a younger, modern transvestite. Like Leda, Eddie lives openly as a woman. Eddie's troubled life includes her father having deserted the family when she was a child, and having had a difficult relationship with her mother following, she who mocked Eddie's ability to be the man the of the family. Gonda enters into a sexual relationship with Eddie, who he promises to make madame of the bar, replacing Leda in both facets of his life, with Eddie having threatened to quit otherwise. While Leda suspects what Gonda and Eddie are up to, Gonda tells Leda what she wants to hear, much as he tells Eddie what she wants to hear. As this ... Written by Huggo
Set in late 60's Tokyo, Toshio Matsumoto's Funeral Parade of Roses is slightly based on Oedipus Rex diving deep into Tokyo's underground gay culture. Passionate and raw, it is a wonderful, harmonized mixture of documentary elements and avant-garde cinema. The movie follows Eddie, a gay boy whom I could not stop comparing to Edie Sedgwick for obvious reasons, portrayed by Shinnosuke Ikehata (commonly known as Peter), focusing on Eddie's past, fame and rivalry with the bar's Mama. The movie's title is a play on words: roses, bara (薔薇) in Japanese, is a symbol of homosexuality and also a shortened version of barazoku (薔薇族 ), the name of Japan's first modern gay men's magazine. One of Japanese New Wave's diamonds, Funeral Parade of Roses was a major influence on Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange.