It’s fitting that Fujisawa Isao’s film Bye Bye Love was long believed to be lost. This liminal, lyrical, genderqueer road movie, rediscovered in a warehouse in 2018, is a tart and singular blend of the filmmaker’s experiences working on both gritty yakuza films and as a member of the cohort loosely labeled the Japanese New Wave, or “Nuberu Bagu” (a transliteration of the French’s “nouvelle vague”). Released in 1974 and played, according to its producer, largely as an independent roadshow attraction, the film reflects the sentiments of the by-then faded counterculture of the 1960s in both style and substance through an emphasis on non-being, artifice, and selfhood. Echoing the dead-end structure of New Hollywood road films like Easy Rider and Bonnie and Clyde, Isao’s tale of doomed drifters on the run reframes the nihilistic “meaninglessness” embodied by the highly symbolic deaths of these previous cinematic outlaws into a tragic-yet-triumphant kind of postmodern self-fabulation.
Bye Bye Love is a film all about the ways identity is constructed, defined, and imposed. After being dumped by his girlfriend over the phone, a young man named Utamaru (Ren Tamura) is sucked into the tempestuous orbit of a beautiful stranger (Miyabi Ichijô), who entreats him for help in avoiding a “pervert.” The pervert, it turns out, is a policeman; the stranger, whose luminous eyes and long, lustrous hair immediately captivate Utamaru, is a shoplifter who just made off with a Jim Morrison record. After Utamaru blithely dispatches the policeman, Utamaru finds the stranger again, beginning a whirlwind courtship.
The identity of this wanderer, who Utamaru names Giko, is the fulcrum of the film. After an extended flirtation during which the pair discuss the relative nature of perception (“colors don’t lie, white is white and blue is blue, but is white still white when it’s mixed with blue?”) while surrounded by images of heavily made up Western fashion models and an American flag, the two deface the iconography and go to bed together. To Utamaru’s surprise, though, Giko isn’t a cis woman. The two stop short of having sex upon this (implied) discovery but stay in bed anyway. Neither seems particularly fazed. Moments later, when Giko’s American lover (the cheekily named “Nixon”) finds them together and Utamaru shoots him to death in self-defense, the two go on the run from the law, flitting through a country defined by abandoned experimental art pieces and brutalist architecture.
“You’re artificial?” Utamaru eventually asks Giko as they pass by billboards of white models in bright makeup. “This whole city is artificial,” Giko replies, “there’s no difference between me and a high heel.” In this one line, Giko, who uses both masculine and feminine pronouns throughout the film, neatly articulates the film’s post-humanist reading of gender performativity under capitalism as a pure, commodified construction –– a full sixteen years before Judith Butler published Gender Trouble.
This emphasis on artificiality is quickly and poignantly universalized when Utamaru picks up a cis woman by a deserted swimming pool. In a visually arresting sequence that evokes the famous opening scene of Hiroshima, Mon Amour, this nameless woman’s body is abstracted through beautiful but alienating extreme closeups and odd, harsh angles. “She’s like an actress” Utamaru intones in voiceover, “her life is all appearances. If there is any real emotion it comes from mimicry… learned in childhood.”
In this context, then, Utamaru too acknowledges that femininity is a construction at its core, something to be produced like “an automobile engine.” It isn’t Giko’s femininity per se that discomforts him, we realize then, but their comfort with their own gender fluidity. “It’s like a love triangle,” they say laughing to Utamaru at one point later in the film, “you, and the male and female me.” If Utamaru’s story alone is a familiar yet playfully told outlaw tale (as Ren Scateni points out, the film stands alone in the Japanese New Wave for its humorous approach to this story of nihilistic youth), a postmodern riff on The Wild One, Giko’s story is something else entirely, a pop art (p)retelling of Agnes Varda’s Vagabond that also presages riotous stories of genderqueer self-discovery like Hedwig and the Angry Inch or even Titane.
Like Bonnie and Clyde before them, then, Giko and Utamaru aren’t exactly lovers. Rather, they’re bound together through attraction that transcends the purely physical. They practically exude mutual need (they are on the run after all) and develop a shared philosophy defined by opposition and loose, tranquil nihilism. Like Giko’s refusal to give Utamatu their real name, Utamaru insists repeatedly “I’m nobody,” expressing a similar lack of interest in meaning-making. The pair’s conversations all hinge on this kind of ambiguity and play: They speak in deflected questions, never satisfying each other with tangible answers. “If I were a windshield––” he says, “I’d be a blizzard” they reply. “If I were water––” “I’d be fire.”
Still, part of what makes Bye Bye Love an exciting piece of queer film history to be rediscovered is that, with almost no antecedents in Japanese cinema, the pair’s undeniable sexual attraction is also explored on screen. In a showstopping extended sequence, this tension is (literally) electrically expressed when they hire a sex worker and consummate the ménage à trois while wrapped in live wires from a radio, their embraces making an alien symphony of zapping, buzzing sounds that set them all shuddering with the charge.
This playful rejection of traditional sexual and gender roles parallels and reframes the broader outlaw narrative, whose conventions are in some ways rather typical of the subgenre from which Isao emerged (the film’s original title was Yakuza Boys). Ultimately, Giko triumphantly insists, “I’m not a man or a woman. I’m nobody.” It’s this final assertion that, like their refusal to literally name themself at the beginning of the story, disrupts Utamaru’s free-flowing hippie sense of looseness as a form of social rejection. Giko’s self-fabulation repolarizes his nihilism into something active, generative, and even transformative that evokes the more optimistic notes hidden in the countercultural desire to “tune in, turn on, and drop out.” In this sense, Giko’s repetition of Utamaru’s signature line triumphantly recalls the closing title card of Bye Bye Love’s most direct Japanese antecedent, Toshio Matsumoto’s incredible 1969 queer experimental drama Funeral Parade of Roses: “The spirit of an individual reaches its own absolute through incessant negation.”
Bye Bye Love is screening Thursday January 23 at Metrograph in New York City.
