A strobe flash. A staring, dilated eye. A mad acceleration that distorts time. Watching Toshio Matsumoto's Funeral Parade of Roses (Bara no Sōretsu) today is not an exercise in cinematic archaeology; it is like receiving an electric shock directly to the optic nerve, an injection of cultural adrenaline that bypasses fifty years of film history and arrives with the undiminished violence of an explosion. Released in 1969, a seismic year for a world on the brink of a collective nervous breakdown, Matsumoto's film is the seismograph itself, the telluric recording of an era and a place: the Tokyo underground of the Shinjuku district, the epicenter of Japan's countercultural, artistic, and political ferment.

Matsumoto, a multifaceted and radical figure, does not limit himself to making a film. He orchestrates a chaotic happening, a sabotage of traditional narrative forms, a frontal assault on the very notion of representation. The film is a fragmented kaleidoscope mixing mockumentary, avant-garde theater, dramatic fiction, pop references, and an iconoclastic fury that tears cinema apart to rebuild it according to its own feverish rules. At the center of this vortex is Eddie, played by an androgynous and magnetic Peter (aka Shinnosuke Ikehata), a tragic and modern figure who works at Genet, a bar for transvestites. The plot, if one can speak of a plot in the conventional sense, is a brazen and brutal anamorphosis of Sophocles' Oedipus Rex. Eddie is in love with the bar's owner, Gonda, who is also the lover of the bar's “madame,” Leda. The rivalry between Eddie and Leda for Gonda's affection leads to tragedy, but this is only the surface of a much deeper psychoanalytic and mythological abyss. Eddie, in fact, unknowingly has a relationship with his own father (Gonda) after causing the death of his mother.

But reducing Funeral Parade of Roses to its Oedipal skeleton would be like describing Joyce's Ulysses as “the story of a guy who spends a day in Dublin.” The film's greatness lies in the way the ancient myth is blown up from within, its incandescent fragments projected against the mirror of modernity. Greek tragedy, with its inevitable Fate and moral architecture, is dragged here into the mud and neon of Shinjuku, stripped of all sacredness and recharged with a thoroughly 20th-century despair. There are no gods weaving the web of Eddie's destiny, but a cycle of psychological trauma, domestic violence, and identities performed to the point of breaking. The final revelation and subsequent blindness are not divine punishment, but the logical and terrible implosion of an existence built on lies and escape from oneself.

Matsumoto's style is an act of semiotic guerrilla warfare. The “documentary” interviews with the transvestites who populate the film continually break the fourth wall, creating an effect of alienation that is both Brechtian and deeply intimate. These characters talk about their lives, their desires, and their surgeries with disarming frankness. Fiction and reality contaminate and overlap each other until they become indistinguishable. Who is Eddie? Is he a character in a film, the unwitting Oedipus, or is he Peter, the actor who plays him? The film itself seems to pose this question, showing the film crew at work, exposing its own internal mechanisms, in a metacinematic gesture that anticipates decades of postmodern reflection. A Godardian echo, certainly, but emptied of its Parisian intellectualism and filled with the desperate carnality of Shinjuku. Where Godard dissected language, Matsumoto tears it to shreds with visceral fury.

Watching the sequences accelerated to the rhythm of classical music, it is impossible not to think of the direct and declared influence this film had on Stanley Kubrick for his A Clockwork Orange. The nighttime rampages, the stylized orgies, the scenes of sex and violence sped up to create a grotesque and disturbing effect: it was all already here, in Bara no Sōretsu, two years earlier. But while Kubrick's effect is one of icy, almost surgical lucidity, Matsumoto's is one of feverish vitality, a raw energy that seems to spring directly from the student protests and sexual liberation that inflamed the streets of Tokyo in those years. The film is a living document of that cultural moment, a portrait of a marginalized community that takes ownership of its own body and representation, challenging the rigid conventions of Japanese society.

The “rose” in the title is a crucial, polysemic symbol. It is the rose that transvestites pin to their chests, a symbol of a constructed, artificial, and proud femininity. It is the ephemeral and thorny beauty of their existence. But it is also a slang term, “bara,” which in certain contexts can refer to gay boys. The funeral is therefore that of an identity, or perhaps of an entire subculture which, at the very moment it explodes in all its vitality on screen, is already celebrating its own funeral rite, aware of its fragility and the violence of the outside world. It is a funeral for lost innocence, for the failure of the utopian dream of the 1960s, which in the film manifests itself in a psychedelic sequence of an artistic happening that degenerates into senseless chaos.

Matsumoto's analysis goes beyond simple sociological commentary. It delves into the ontological core of identity. What does it mean to “be” a man or a woman? Is it a question of biology, clothing, performance? The film responds by showing that every identity is a mask, a construct. Even the revolutionary students, with their intellectual poses and political slogans, are shown to be actors in another kind of theater. In a brilliant scene, an avant-garde director is shooting a film within the film, and his actor complains about the falseness of acting, in a metatextual short circuit that pulverizes all certainty. The only truth seems to be that of trauma, of pain that resurfaces from the past to destroy the present, like a karst river that finally finds a violent outlet.

The ending is one of the most shocking in the history of cinema. The discovery of the incestuous truth does not lead to a cathartic recognition, but to an explosion of primordial violence. Eddie's act of gouging out his eyes with the same knife he used to kill his mother and with which his mother committed suicide is a scream that pierces the screen. It is the closing of the circle, the realization that the cycle of violence cannot be broken. The final image, with the two eyeballs staring at us from the ground, is an indictment of the viewer, called upon to witness a horror that transcends fiction and touches the deepest chords of human tragedy.

Funeral Parade of Roses is not an easy film. It is a demanding, fragmented work, at times repulsive in its brutality. But it is one of those total cinematic experiences that redefine the boundaries of what is possible. It is a cultural singularity, a point of collapse where Artaud's theater, Warhol's Pop Art, Genet's philosophy, and Sophocles' tragedy converge, all filtered through a uniquely Japanese and irrevocably modern sensibility. It is a work of cultural thermite that has eroded the foundations of narrative cinema from within, leaving behind not ruins, but open space for a new, freer, more dangerous cinema. An absolute masterpiece, a fragment of a broken mirror that still reflects, with ruthless lucidity, our deformed face.