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Screening online for Canadians at 2020’s online Fantasia Film Festival
DIRECTED BY: Macoto Tezuka
FEATURING: Gorô Inagaki, Fumi Nikaidô
PLOT: Yosuke Mikura, a popular writer facing a creative lull, meets Barbara and develops an obsession with her.
COMMENTS: Damn it, Barbara, you were so very close. Your devil-may-care manic-pixie-dream-girl self was crafted by one of Japan’s most renowned manga artists. You were brought to life in a ragged city milieu, spouting poetry. You toyed so mischievously with the mind of a famous young writer. Your mother constantly wore a helmet-hat made out of cherry cordials. You knocked back 50-year-old single malt Scotch like the pro I always wanted to be. And you just up and dropped the frickin’ ball—right on my eyeball.
It is only because I want to give Osamu Tezuka a fair shake in the future that I won’t hold Tezuka’s Barbara against him. His work might someday actually achieve the weirdness I was looking for, instead of just shamelessly flirting with it. Yosuke is a dull cipher of a protagonist, but that’s fine; all the better to provide the viewer a lens through which to witness the following: frantic lovemaking to a living mannequin cut short by a deft, head-removing smack from a liquor bottle; unsettling voodoo-doll machinations targeted against Barbara’s romantic rival; sociopolitical commentary in the form of Yosuke’s scheming fiancée’s scheming-er father; an all-nude “old religion,” hyper-ritualized with body-oiling wedding ceremony; and promises of necrophilia followed by a cannibalistic snack. But everything collapses into gauzy, melodramatic mush.
If you hear bitterness in my tone, I can assure you it’s there. I had the Apocrypha Candidate review all lined up in my head as I watched Barbara. I was going to compare it to Naked Lunch, due to the films’ shared urban filth and dissonant jazz score. I was going to quip that “Barbara is exactly the girl that Céline and Julie would have met and eaten strange candies with during their Junior year abroad.” Now, I won’t be able to revel in the clever observations about how Barbara captured low-literary romance with high production values.
Instead, I found myself on tenterhooks waiting for the movie’s half-dozen-plus weird ingredients to turn the corner; “weirdus interruptus” doesn’t even begin to describe the disappointment. This is a review written out of spite, and I wouldn’t blame management for not posting it. However, as Yosuke needed to get Barbara out of his system, I desperately needed to get Barbara out of mine.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
I’m not sure why you’d hold ANY adaptation made long after the original author died against them. I’m not necessarily familiar with the original, but calling an adaptation he literally couldn’t have touched “Osamu Tezuka’s work” seems kind of insulting, even if it’s made by a family member.
I apologise for the poor phrasing, but I meant to indicate how I would never hold the son’s mediocre film against the long-dead father, or the father’s original creation; I do not remotely blame Osamu Tezuka–and I am hopeful that the writer/illustrator’s works might find better translators to the screen than the fellow’s son has turned out to be.
Damn, Giles, you need a break? You’ve been carrying half the site around here. What happened to all the other writers we used to have?
I’m so sorry to have been a stranger here but other projects and a derecho got in the way.
Thank you most kindly for your consideration, but I’ve spoken with Ebenezer Smalley about only working a half-day on Christmas and, bless his heart, he said he’d consider it.
I couldn’t pay Giles to skip writing up a Fantasia screening.
(This is true.)