“MERRY XMAS MR. LAURENCE” 1983 | 2h03’ [UK/JP] | DAVID BOWIE Cinema Scrngs
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## Ciclo DAVID BOWIE: METAMORFOSE E VERTIGEM
[DAVID BOWIE: METHAMORFOSIS AND VERTIGO Cinema Screenings]
“MERRY CHRISTMAS, MR. LAWRENCE”
1983 | M/16 | 2h03’ [UK / JP / NZ] (Feliz Natal, Mr. Lawrence - PT)
De Nagisa Oshima
Sexta Dia 10/04 às 19h30 [Friday 04/09 at 7:30pm]
Num campo de prisioneiros japonês durante a Segunda Guerra Mundial, um oficial britânico e um comandante japonês desenvolvem uma relação complexa marcada por códigos de honra, choque cultural e desejo reprimido. Entre disciplina militar e humanidade frágil, o filme explora a tensão entre poder, culpa e compaixão.
In a Japanese POW camp during World War II, a British officer and a Japanese commander develop a complex relationship shaped by honor, cultural clash, and suppressed desire. Between military discipline and fragile humanity, the film explores power, guilt, and compassion.
Spoken in Japanese/English | Subtitled in English
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More info and reservations:
https://prosacultural.org/cinema/davidbowie
There are artists whose presence in cinema goes far beyond acting. They become forces of displacement. Every gesture, every glance, every silence carries an energy capable of altering the balance of the image itself. David Bowie was one of those rare figures: an artist of perpetual metamorphosis, able to move through music, theatre, performance and cinema as if inhabiting several identities at once.
More than an occasional actor, Bowie brought to the screen a distinctive sense of vertigo. His characters often seem to exist on a threshold — between cultures, between eras, between the human and the enigmatic. In that encounter, cinema becomes a space of productive instability: a place where the performer’s face never fully settles into a single identity.
This cycle revisits two very different films, both animated by that same energy of displacement.
In Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence (1983), directed by Nagisa Oshima, Bowie plays Major Jack Celliers, a British prisoner in a Japanese camp during the Second World War. The film constructs a delicate territory of tensions between honour, desire, discipline and cultural alterity. More than a war drama, it is a study of the confrontation between incompatible moral codes — where Bowie’s magnetic presence introduces an almost mythical dimension. His character becomes a kind of foreign body within the military order, quietly disturbing the hierarchies of power and obedience.
Between war and youth, between silence and spectacle, these two works reveal something essential about Bowie: his ability to exist in cinema as a liminal figure — someone who never fully belongs to the world he inhabits, yet precisely for that reason illuminates it in unexpected ways.
(Curatorship by Alexandre Braga)
All Cinema PROSA films will be shown on an illuminated pixel (65’’ QLED screen) in a room with a maximum capacity of 24 spectators.
Come and have a glass of wine or a non-alcoholic drink in the cinema room with us!