The Ceremony

NEW 35mm PRINT!  │  More than a few Oshima experts cite The Ceremony as the director’s pinnacle achievement. The film is certainly one of his most ambitious works: a penetrating, provocative family saga and political allegory that parallels, over several decades, the rise and fall of the Sakuradas, a  powerful, patriarchal merchant clan, with the fate of postwar Japan. The Japanese title translates as “ceremonies,” which is more  appropriate; the film is structured around a series of family gatherings — anniversaries, weddings, funerals — that play out in often strikingly absurd, bizarrely funny ways. “Ceremonies are a time when the special characteristics of the Japanese spirit are revealed,” Oshima would explain. “It is this spirit that concerns and worries me.”  “The summation of Oshima’s work to date . . . In this film, Oshima reveals his innermost feelings in nearly perfect form” (Max Tessier). “His masterpiece . . . a bleak but luminous picture of how domestic ritual destroys or perverts the life force in a family. Once again, the stinging touch of a Buñuel is evident” (David Thomson). “Brilliant and haunting . . . a truly modern film, but with classical echoes . . . it is not to be missed” (Andrew Sarris, Village Voice). Colour, 35mm, in Japanese with English subtitles. 123 mins.