Forgive me for briefly imagining a spiritual connection between John Lawrence, the titular protagonist of Nagisa Ōshima’s chilly Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence, and T.E. Lawrence, memorably embodied by Peter O’Toole in David Lean’s Cinemascope epic, but I had mixed up my characters. You see, the flaxen-haired, angular-faced O’Toole doesn’t look radically dissimilar to his younger countryman, the protean David Bowie, and the parallels don’t stop there. Both men are cultural interlopers, thousands of miles from Mother Britannia, unsure of their footing in a strange land.
Ah, memory. I first saw Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence – or portions of it – in my teens, more years ago than I care to say, on cable, possibly Bravo, and I’d forgotten that the Lawrence of the title is actually played by British stage stalwart Tom Conti, and that David Bowie portrays Major Jack Celliers, a character crucial to the story, but with considerably less screen time. I was fascinated by the explosive opening scene, but the film was far too cerebral for my fresh-out-of-high-school mindset, weaned on Entertainment Tonight and Aaron Spelling fluff. It was an intellectual puzzle I couldn’t be bothered to solve.