Dogra Magra (1988)

 

Director: Toshio Matsumoto

Screenplay: Atsushi Yamatoya and Toshio Matsumoto

Adapted from a novel by Yumeno Kyūsaku

Cast: Yôji Matsuda as Kure Ichiro; Shijaku Katsura II as Prof. Masaki; Hideo Murota as Prof. Wakabayashi; Eri Misawa as Moyoko; Kyôko Enami as Yayako

An Abstract Candidate / A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies)

 

Opening with a poem asking a foetus if it undulates with dread, we are in odd waters here from the get-go. Dogra Magra is a curious film in general, which is not a surprise when its director is Toshio Matsumoto, an experimental filmmaker who started with shorts and documentary productions before his debut, his most well known film Funeral Parade of Roses (1969). One of his only films widely available, it is however also a masterpiece, a significant one in LGBTQ cinema as it proudly is avant-garde. Sadly Matsumoto's cinema afterwards is not readily available, a shame as alongside another horror film, the period samurai drama Demons (1971), Dogra Magra is another film missing out of circulation, a shame as this, his last film, is Matsumoto not compromising himself if in the veneer of horror murder mysteries.

It also presents the lack of representation of Japan's history of pulp, horror and unconventional literature, as more readily available in French and Chinese publications, Dogra Magra is also an adaptation of a novel by Yumeno Kyūsaku. First published in 1935, Kyūsaku with just the adaptation of this story feels like a sibling to Edogawa Ranpo in terms of not only writing detective novels, but also known for having both horror and idiosyncratically weird flourishes to his storytelling, with Dogra Magra also tapping in psychoanalysis and a critique of psychology at the same time. Sogo "Gakuryû" Ishii's Labyrinth of Dreams (1997), another film in dire need of more notice, is based on a Yumeno Kyūsaku novel, about a young woman in the thirties to forties, working as a "bus girl", who thinks the young bus driver she works with is seducing and killing women in her job role.

This film does use the detective mystery trappings fully, set within the period it was originally written and with the first shot being a young man (Yôji Matsuda) waking up in a psychiatric hospital. He is an amnesiac, and neither helping is that the hospital is in turmoil as its head, Prof. Masaki (Shijaku Katsura II) has just passed. Openly, and this has to be adapted to, this narrative embraces the tone of a mystery where most of the dialogue is exposition, as Kure Ichiro as he comes to be is the confused figure in the labyrinth of shifting perspectives, even of who he is and whether he was the suggested person in the first place. That there is a young woman in the room next to his claiming he to be connected to him, and reacts when he enters the room, complicates this.

His tale circles around Ching-hsui, a macabre tale of an ancient Chinese painter who strangled his wife, the daughter of the Emperor, and painted her decaying body, turning to another source for a corpse to finish the painted scroll. Having to escape to Japan, with a woman who survives him, his lineage biologically through her is linked to Kure Ichiro, including the original scroll having been preserved as a gristly heirloom. Masaki, a very flamboyant man, may still be alive too, a psychologist who believed that memories and ideas infect the offspring on a genetic level, Kure Ichiro for him possibly an heir to Ching-hsui's lineage. Kure Ichiro is possibly the young medical student who has strangled his fiancée and tried to draw her corpse, repeating history of the far past. Dogra Magra has no clear ending to this, and some will hate this film because it fully invests in a similar trope of everything being a dream and being suspicious.  If you can accept this, then the film becomes a case, particularly with these tropes of morbid horror/thriller stories, where exposition becomes the flavour text.

The title is taken from a chant from a secret Christian sect in Nagasaki, within a novel written by a student and kept in Masaki's office, the parchment if read is meant to drive one mad. This one of the many aspects circling within Dogra Magra's curious brew of ideas, Kure Ichiro possibly the medical student, Prof. Masaki possibly still alive, and the new head of the psychiatric hospital Prof. Wakabayashi (Hideo Murota) possibly is having a power play over the former head. Wakabayashi may be a possible killer in his own right. Masaki's office alone sets this in the horror genre and the strangeness it imbibes from, when it has babies in jars and the head of a cat preserved among the decoration, from a man who attempted to poison his whole family's meal with said animal, embracing the macabre fully. This skirts horror and exploitation, with its gristly premise touching on sensuality against murder and decay. A really gruesome scene, possibly a lie, suggests Prof. Wakabayashi is also a psychopath who, alongside having Ichiro's presumed dead fiancée in the nearby room to him, cuts up women's corpses to mutilate them and fondle their inner organs.

As Toshio Matsumoto made a horror film beforehand, Demons, he would be aware of how to make the film as it became. The co-screenwriter Atsushi Yamatoya clearly has his influence here too. Together with Takeo Kimura, Yōzō Tanaka, Chūsei Sone, Yutaka Okada, Seiichirō Yamaguchi, and Yasuaki Hangai, as part of the group "Guru Hachirō", he helped write Branded to Kill (1967), Seijun Suzuki's legendary and eccentric crime masterpiece. In mind to his work, including directing and writing the bizarre avant-garde pinku film Inflatable Sex Doll of the Wastelands (1967), Yamatoya adapting Yumeno Kyūsaku fully embraces the dreamlike and a complete lack of a cohesive reality. In terms of this period too, the eighties, you did also find directors from the art house and experimental corners of Japanese cinema enter more openly genre films, not losing their flourishes and unconventionality at all. Funeral Parade of Roses was an Art Theatre Guild release, the ATG a legendary film production company that, originally distributing films, began producing movies for the likes of Nagisa Oshima to Akio Jissoji until the mid-80s. The directors who work were released through ATG did move into genre cinema, even Shūji Terayama with a French-Japanese erotic film Fruits of Passion (1981), and Jissoji, who had worked in pulp beforehand in the sixties, continuing with even a blockbuster in production and spectacle, Tokyo: The Last Megalopolis (1987).

With a film like Dogra Magra, it does not feel a compromise but the creators behind this bringing their styles to the material, especially in mind to screenwriter Atsushi Yamatoya and his history in erotic genre films during the sixties and seventies, stretching themselves to themes of mortality, eroticism, and here the slipping layers of sanity through the style of genre. Dogra Magra, like Akio Jossoji's own Marquis de Sade's Prosperities of Vice (1988), even Tokyo: The Last Megalopolis, is also a film which feels and is made as a production that came from the eighties, particularly its use of coloured lighting, but is dealing with the past in Japanese history. Particularly there are films which skirt into genre and surrealism that circle around or are within the time of the Taisho era of 1912 to 1926, Dogra Magra finding itself bedfellows with Seijun Suzuki tackling his "Taisho" Trilogy in films like Heat-Haze Theatre (1981). This helps Dogra Magra greatly as, once you accept the exposition as part of the purple prose, it guards the film in its period setting, and its sombre elegance, only to have its Grand Guignol touches (the jars of body parts in Masaki's office, the slithers of blood, even a surreal moment of a portrait of Masaki having lips superimposed to allow him to talk) stand out greater in its ornate appearance.

Cinematographer Tatsuo Suzuki is a huge factor in mind of this aesthetic too, coming from the Art Theatre Guild era. Having filmed Funeral Parade of Roses for Toshio Matsumoto, a very different film in aesthetic style, he also worked on productions for Shûji Terayama, which this shares touches to with even the use of colour. The film also has flourishes which are unconventional. The tale of Ching-hsui itself, as told to us as it is to Kure Ichiro, is depicted with puppets, which is as extravagant as it is telling a truly gristly ancient tale with a beauty in the aesthetic tone. Masaki himself, an amateur filmmaker, has recordings which bring in black 'n' white silent film storytelling, disregarding logic in that you have intertitles spliced in-between for when patients he was filming talk directly to the camera.

Also a factor to the film's tone, helping it considerably, is that one of the most compelling figures in the film, Masaki himself, is the standout performance but not from a cinematic actor. Shijaku Katsura II was better known as a Japanese rakugo performer of the late 20th century, who often performed in English and wished to bring the art to the West. Rakugo is an art form involving one lone storyteller performing a narrative, with multiple characters and long form tales, and even a semblance of knowledge of this, even if barely scratched on, shows Katsura was the right man for Masaki. Born Tōru Maeda, not only does he perform the lion's share of exposition with Hideo Murota as Prof. Wakabayashi, a prolific actor at this point, but also particularly with Masaki as a character, Shijaku Katsura II was the right choice of someone who could figure out how to present the character. Bald with a pencil thin moustache, Masaki is an eccentric, who believes the mind is an illusion and human beings closer to animals, all the psychological details of the text a critique of such a character, as his therapy practices leads to one of the patients killing another. Katsura can make him both compelling and prevent so much exposition from being flat in tone. Particularly as Yôji Matsuda as the lead has to play a cipher for the most part, until he may start recovering memories and find horror in what he has done, Katsura with Murota have to keep the film suspended throughout, Masaki thanks to Katsura becoming a carnival ring leader of a cult of personality in how he is played.

This is a film of an avant-garde artist, as a semblance of an ending is knowledge, whilst a dream-within-a-dream, our lead is hiding secrets which his mind will never accept and will literally reset once discovered, as obvious as you can depict it without being heavy handed. A shot in a country field full of corpses will mark this, closer to something from Shûji Terayama's Pastoral: To Die in the Country (1974) in tone and its complete surreal mood, another film cinematographer Tatsuo Suzuki worked on. Dogra Magra is, honestly, a film I could imagine the Art Theatre Guild would have released if sadly they did not close earlier in the decade. It however says a lot about the eighties in Japanese cinema in general, when there were still other producers and companies who brought films like this to existence, that you could stumble over fascinating works like this to the screen, all in dire need of more awareness of them.

Abstract Spectrum: Abstract/Grotesque/Surreal

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): Medium