Operetta Tanuki Goten

It is starting to look that musical is what old masters turn to. Last year we saw Alain Resnais’ “Pas Sur La Bouche,” and this year we have Suzuki Seijun’s 鈴木清順 “Operetta Tanuki Goten 狸御殿.” Both are formal exercises in musical in the operetta tradition. They are fluffy, fun, lovely to look at, and ultimately not saying much of anything at all. It is as if they both get back to their childhood to re-experience the innocent fun of youth. Tanuki has received some bad reactions in film festivals and it is understandable. The film is structured like a Kabuki plays and so the scenes are by nature surreal and the narrative truncated. The story also resembles classical Japanese fairytales. That could have been well received if it remained “authentically” so, whatever that means. But Suzuki made film in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, so his music includes rap, pop, classical as well as traditional. It all seems a crazy mash of cultures and genres. If we look at the director, however, we realize that this is perhaps an accurate summery of a life in film—on a classical format are attached a multitude of influences. It may lack harmony, and often not very well held together, but in old age the director had found the fun and love for filmmaking. It is lovely in its sense of fun and the child in himself that old man found.