Utamaro (Ren Tamura), a shaggy-haired drifter, has just broken up with his girlfriend over payphone. With his skinny jeans, snazzy outfit, and pistol, there’s a touch of Monkey Punch’s Lupin III to him. No sooner has he put down the phone when he collides with Giko (Miyabi Ichijô)—beautiful, long-haired, the epitome of Meiko Kaji chic. The mysterious androgyne resumes running until they’re out of the frame. Utamaro and the spectator follow, breaking boundaries of form and logic as they go.
Assistant director to Hiroshi Teshigahara on Woman in the Dunes (1964) and The Face of Another (1966), both of which also play at Metrograph this weekend, Isao Fujisawa made his directorial debut with the recently rediscovered Bye Bye Love (1974), an experimental 16mm feature that’s queer both in content and form. At its core, Bye Bye Love is a straightforwardly meandering “girl and a gun” road movie that nods to Godard with its striking paint-splash colour and anti-American satirical streak. The film is loose, driven by free-associative dialogues and physical explorations between the seemingly straight Utamaro and the presciently queer Giko. Early scenes in Giko’s home recall the relational deconstructions of Jacques Rivette’s L’Amour fou (1969).
Arriving in the wake of Toshio Matsumoto's trans envelope-pushing Funeral Parade of Roses (1969), Bye Bye Love features an explicitly genderfluid deuteragonist—rare representation, even today. In the first of two striking sex scenes, Giko sits bandaged in measuring tape on the bed, lit in a green Vertigo glow of transformative possibility. For a film so focused in its dialogues on how we appear to others, it’s fascinating how unconcerned Fujisawa is with defining Giko's body. Through smart framing and angling, physical sex markers are largely obscured. Bye Bye Love is a film that wants you to perceive its world in the fluidity that it speaks so passionately of. The second of these sequences, a ménage à trois that spans the spectrum of gender, has the three entangled in radio wires that they shock each other with in pleasure and pain—bodies intertwining until indistinguishable. The potentialities that Fujisawa offers are radical. In a startling climactic sequence, we’re shown a transition timeline in reverse: from woman, to boy, to nothing—or perhaps anything.
Bye Bye Love screens this evening, January 19, and on January 20 and 23, at Metrograph as part of the series “Bye Bye Love: Fujisawa Isao and the Japanese New Wave.”
