Tag Archives: Macoto Tezuka

FANTASIA FILM FESTIVAL 2020 CAPSULE: TEZUKA’S BARBARA (2019)

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Screening online for Canadians at 2020’s online Fantasia Film Festival

DIRECTED BY: Macoto Tezuka

FEATURING: Gorô Inagaki,

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:

“… an exceedingly bizarre love story that is too distanced to be moving, but still has its visual and other pleasures..” -Deborah Young, The Hollywood Reporter (festival screening)