Caterpillar

If you are familiar with Koji Wakamatsu's films and his career, you'll love the absurdity of this film and its political message
Among Koji Wakamatsu's films, "Caterpillar" is no doubt his best film yet. Unsettling but yet managing to retain the political message that Wakamatsu incorporates in his films.

For those who are familiar with Koji Wakamatsu's oeuvre and have looked at the filmmaker's history, you will know that he is well-known for his pink movie films of the '60s and '70s and his contribution to the "Pink Eiga" genre. To also know that he was a producer of Nagisa Oshima's controversial film "In the Realm of Senses" (1976) and similar to Oshima, willing to take on films that are not traditional style of storytelling in Japan and are known to have an edge.

But similar to Nagisa Oshima, Wakamatsu is also a rebel. In 2008, his film "United Red Army" was a docudrama on the tragedy of the Japanese radical left and America and in 2011, he began working on another political film based on the acclaimed novelist and political activist Yukio Mishima titled "1.25 Jiketsu No Hi, Mishima...

Banzai to the War God
By far the most conventional of Wakamatsu's films, Caterpillar is, nonetheless, extremely effective in its use of icons to construct an antiwar poem for all time: the reoccurring image of villagers throwing up their arms shouting "Banzai! Banzai!", the neatly framed portraits of the Emperor and Empress displayed next to the newspaper clipping and the hero's three war medals, the quadriplegic veteran forever lying behind the screen, routinely fed, cleansed and serviced by his wife (deftly played by Shinobu Terajima, for which she was named best actress at the Berlin International Film Festival). But the most indelible image is that of the "caterpillar" dressed up in coat, medals and hat, who is paraded around as the "War God" in a garden cart. This must be the most absurd yet dramatically charged image of insanity, group insanity, as villagers bow and officers salute. The "War God" is indeed a hell-being and within this mutilated man's mind we catch glimpses of horrors in repeated...

The God of Soldiers
The first few minutes of "Caterpillar" do not promise a great movie. Shot on what looks like digital video, with bad special effects of a burning building that look like they were done on someone's home computer, I figured this was yet another low-budget Japanese horror film.

I was wrong.

Nominated for Golden Bear (director) and winner of the Silver Bear (Best actress) at the Berlin International Film Festival, "Caterpillar" is an intense anti-war film, heavily political and nothing even approaching a horror film. Director Wakamatsu Koji made the film in response to the re-release of Mishima Yukio's militaristic right-wing movie Patriotism, showing the harsh reality of Japan's military cult of WWII.

Nominally based off of Edogawa Rampo's banned short story of the same name (Found in Japanese Tales of Mystery & Imagination), "Caterpillar" shares only the briefest of association...

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