Taboo
By Jonathan Rosenbaum
I’m honoring the request of New Yorker Films to refer to Taboo by its English title, but according to a Japanese friend, “taboo” isn’t an accurate translation of its original title, Gohatto–a somewhat old-fashioned term that means “against the law” or “against the laws.” (One fascinating aspect of the Japanese language from a Western perspective is its lack of distinction between singular and plural nouns, which injects ambiguity into many titles.) Still, Taboo seems an appropriate title, given that throughout his career Oshima has been known, inside as well as outside Japan, as a taboo breaker.
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Rumors circulate about Kano and other men in the Shinsengumi, and whether this feverish speculation is the result of repressed homoeroticism or simple curiosity or some combination thereof is never made clear. Kano, who’s generally dressed in white (the color of mourning in Japan), seems to figure increasingly as an angel-of-death figure, though whether this is willed or inadvertent is also never made clear. We can’t even be sure that Tashiro is genuinely smitten with him–perhaps his sexual pursuit of Kano is a form of competition, an indication of his desire to be the one in power. Sometimes these ambiguities are discussed by the officers, sometimes they’re part of internal monologues delivered offscreen, and sometimes they’re expressed in the offscreen narration or in the extended silent intertitles that appear between certain sequences. Like the singing narrator of Chunhyang, who’s sometimes heard offscreen and sometimes seen performing in front of a live contemporary audience, these fascinating intertitles–often appearing in bunches and concentrating on codes and prohibitions relating to military conduct–are simultaneously traditional and avant-garde, harking back to silent cinema while adding yet another highly modernist form of ambiguity.
