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Five years ago, when Go Takamine made his first feature, Paradise View, the world was not quite ready for the "New Okinawan Cinema". Now Untama Giru leaves us no choice but to lie back and take an interest.
This ia a gloriously indolent fantasy, an Okinawan folk-myth set in 1969, just before the U.S. handed back Okinawa back to Japan. Jiru is here not as the Okinawan Robin Hood of legend hut a sugar-plant worker who flees into the Untama Forest when he happens upon his boss' guilty secret - which is that his beloved adopted daughter is actually a mad sow in human disguise.
Boss Nishibaru is blind but nonetheless a sure shot with his spear and Giru fears for his life. In the forest he learns to levitate, which conveniently allows him to float free of the fractional struggles between pro-Americans, pro-Japanese and supporters of Okinawan independence.
Giru's adventures are celebrated in song by the most unlikely barbershop quintet in movie history and guided by his permanently stoned sister, who enjoys telepathic rapport with animals. Okinawa is seen as a languid tropical paradise pregnant with mysteries that touch even the American colonizers: John Sayles appears as the U.S. High Commissioner who gets off on blood transfusions from monkeys and pigs.
The film's backbone is its sense of Okinawa's spiritual independence from all its colonial masters, but agit-prop was never this spaced-out. In its funny, subversive and irtsistenly haunting way, Takamine's wonderful film is the nearest thing yet to a live-action Robert Crumb cartoon. (T.R.)