Thermae Romae

[Roger Macy]

Thermae Romae, TAKEUCHI Hideki

The Far East Film Festival in Udine this week was sometimes in danger of losing its tag as "the film festival for popular asian cinema".  Besides campaigning South Korean films, we've had indie Chinese films, both realist and satirical.  But the Japanese films have stayed steadfastly mainstream.

Since Udine last Saturday beat Tokyo this weekend for the world premiere of Thermae Romae, perhaps I could write a little on this film.

Filmed in Cinecittà, it's essentially a sci-fi rom-com that builds on the premise of that well-known worm-hole that runs from the thermae in Rome in 130AD to an onsen in present-day Japan, via a bravura tenor singing Verdi atop a mountain.  This is no more preposterous than Dr. Who, but unlike that series, the two sides of the romantic pull are two thousand years apart.  For Japanese fans, the credibility problem may be in believing that two such well-exposed faces can be habitués of the baths (Dr. Who principals don't usually start famous).  For non-Japanese, the problem is different: why do these two not understand each other when they're both speaking Japanese? - and, for the same reason, why does she need to pick up 'Latin for dummies' ?  But this is just a quibble: fantasy characters have their own attributes ('zombies don't run' is a line from another Japanese film here) and, I'm sure, when Dr. Who visits ancient Egypt, a couple of cod-pharaonic phrases serve to set it all up.  But the essential cod-phrases didn't make it through the subtitles.

None of this mattered too much because the film was funny. Takeuchi and his writers fashion an especially shiny suite of lavatorial jokes

The worst of the film is right at the beginning.  It starts with an absurdly 'serious' heavy voice-over 'telling' how the Roman empire became the greatest empire in the world, ruled by emperors who were worshipped as gods. But this is forcing a historical parallel that isn't there.  The Roman expansionist phase was as a republic, the subsequent deifications were top-down, and didn't lead to much actual religious activity by subjects.  The tribes the early Romans defeated seemed more prone to leader-worship. Given the thread of other fantasy manga and films that serve up alternative imperial histories, perhaps this does matter, particularly as we go back into history at the end.

Due to the warm reception to the film, the small pile of the original manga had sold out at the bookstall, so I can't readily check how much of this is just following Mari Yamazaki's original, but looking at part 2, it seems the film follows one striking aesthetic. Nearly two hours shooting in bathhouses revealed not a single pubic hair, let alone pudenda.

Roger
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