Funeral Parade of Roses

Like Oshima's contemporary Diary of a Shinjuku Thief, this still extraordinary filmwas a response to the 1968 student riots. But Matsumoto goes further than Oshima - into Shinjuku 2-chome, Tokyo's gay ghetto, to enact a queer revamp of the Oedipus myth. Popular young trannie Eddie (Peter, later the Fool in Ran) throws himself into affairs with a black GI anda Japanese hippie to drown out his memoriesof killing his mother when he caught her inflagrante with a stranger. Then he shacks upwith Gonda, manager of the gay bar Genet, only to find out that the man is his long-lost father. Matsumoto splinters the story's time-frame, splashes captions across the frame and cuts in bits of ciné vérité and interviews with the cast - making it one of the most formally advanced films of the psychedelic decade.