Funeral Parade of Roses (1969)

• 83%
• 1969
• Toshio Matsumoto
• Shinnosuke Ikehata
• Yoshio Tsuchiya
• Emiko Azuma

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 triangle plays itself out, what actually happens is affected by a joint history between Gonda and Eddie of which they are unaware. This film teeters between fiction and non-fiction as a secondary story is Eddie's friendship with a group of counter-culturalists, including filmmaker Guevara, whose making of a movie mirrors the making of this film. That balance tips into non-fiction as the actual actors in this and Guevara's movie talk about issues covered in this film, such as drug use, and sexuality, especially transvestism as the transvestite characters are played by real life transvestites.