Cinema
Non-sequential
Ted Whitehead
The Boxer (Scala Tottenham St.) RenaIdo & Clara (Camden Plaza) Shuji Terayama is Japan's top racing correspondent and tipster, as well as being a poet, novelist and essayist and leader of the experimental theatre group Tenjosajiki, which visited the Riverside last spring with their Artaudian version of Swift's Directions to Servants. Significantly that show, for all its sensational imagery, was far less subversive than Swift's original, since it replaced • his ferocious satire on the social hierarchy with a doomy insistence on the human need for a master, and suggested that Terayama was a social radical who despaired of the possibility of radical change. Some of this ambivalence comes through his third feature film, The Boxer (A), which uses a storyline fit for a Hollywood melodrama to attack the material and spiritual squalor of Tokyo.
Haybusa, an ex-champ, coaches young Temma over a series of five patches to prepare him for the East Japan New Junior Featherweight Championship. Each man has his own problems: Haybusa is a drunkard, ruined by the loss of his wife and also of his belief in boxing, and desperate about his failing eyesight; Temma is suffering from rejection in love and a marked limp — an awkward disability for an aspiring boxer. The director drives his narrative along at a fast clip to a melodramatic and predictable climax, but the interest of the film lies elsewhere, in the exotic images of the Japanese adapting their traditions to the new Westernised environment. Before the opening bout the audience stand in silent prayer for a dead champ while ten gongs sound and youngsters giggle. A young girl sits mooning over a typewriter beneath a poster of Hollywood-style lovers. Haybusa lies drunk on the floor of his filthy one-room flat and his ex-wife arrives, offering her body plus a jar of his favourite pickles. A man at an ironing board burns a shirt, while looking up a young girls's skirt to her great delight. Tinkling Oriental music alternates with rock as Tatsuo Suzuki's camera explores the urban jungle of narrow alleyways, tram tracks, canals, and the tenement blocks and wooden huts that house the booming population. It's an unfamiliar picture of contemporary Tokyo that makes the film engrossing, for all its emotional crudity. If Terayama's intentions arc ambivalent, Bob Dylan's in Renaldo & Clara (AA) are quite bewildering. Is it a road movie? Is it a biopic? Is it a docudrama? No, it's Bob doing his thing. The flira,_.0 offers four hours of the singer in 111 quadrophonic sound. He wears a mask:" white paint and calls himself Renalt while his wife at the time, Sara, poPs " and out of the action under the name 0.„." Clara. Joan Baez plays The Woman ' White, Ronnie Hawkins plays Bob DY1814 and Ronee Blakley plays Mrs DYlaii; Allen Ginsberg is in there, along withtiiplaywright Sam Shepard, who was hire" to write dialogue but somehow ended uP acting instead. Apparently nothing ,whaast scripted, though the credits allege "— the film was 'written' by Dylan. What results is a formal hotchpotch'„: series of non-sequential scenes. There a.7„ personal dramas involving R & C 8t Co., dialogue at soap-opera level and a pervasive romantic sexism, echoing 'She aches just woman, but she breaks just like a in tilde girl'. I ached just like a critic, as the 01 triangle was constantly broken and formed. There are bizarre dream sect" ences designed to hint at chic decadenced which come across as both vapid alio. naive. Then there are documentary Itto ences, some embarrassing, such as d offering his sympathy toBlacks an, 5 Indians, kissing old women and habitei, like a good politician should; some hila'er ous, as Dylan and Ginsberg stand °vies the grave of Jack Kerouac and swaP !ate( of Graves-I-have-seen ('I've seen V,Ic,r). Hugo's — have you seen Chekhov Finally there are the scenes from PYlader 75/76 tour with the Rolling IhtiP Revue, in which he gives some startlingof original and inventive interpretationsnw_d familiar songs. If only he had con. teor himself with making a road movie alternatively hired an objective writer , director to do one of the other things Prur erly.
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