Giko (Miyabi Ichijô) and Utamaro (Ren Tamura) in Fujisawa Isao’s Bye Bye Love (All images courtesy of Metrograph)
“Help! There’s a pervert after me!”
A gorgeous woman (or so we assume) with petite features, framed by her pencil-thin eyebrows and gigantic 1970s bug sunglasses, dashes up to a man with mussed hair and a blue and red striped shirt, rudely interrupting his shouty breakup phone call with a soon-to-be ex: “Only losers get married. Fuck that!…I wouldn’t fuck you if you begged me!” Instantly forgetting his now-bygone girlfriend, Utamaro (Ren Tamura) trips this panicked woman’s pursuer, a cop. “You! Did you grope that girl?” he jeers, bending over to meet the cop’s eyes. “She’s a shoplifter!” the cop hollers, settling on arresting Utamaro instead. However, this arrest is only temporary as, spotting the cop’s moment of weakness, zipping up post-urinal, Utamaro yanks away his gun, pointing it at him. After escaping and leering at several women parading down the street, he finds his mystery girl, who he later names Giko (Miyabi Ichijô), at a stoplight, clutching her coveted klepto haul: an album by the Doors.
Who wouldn’t root for these star-crossed antisocial soulmates after this Jim Morrison-inspired meet-cute for the criminally insane?!
Fujisawa Isao’s long-lost, low-budget 1974 Japanese New Wave film Bye Bye Love (or Baibai rabu), which had its US theatrical premiere at Metrograph last weekend with a few remaining screening dates this week, is an outlaw romance in the style of Bonnie and Clyde as Utamaro and Giko terrorize the Japanese coast. Their crime wave starts small with petty transgressions like dining and dashing at a local restaurant, using the police-issued pistol as an added incentive for the indignant waiter. However, the spree quickly ramps up when Utamaro shoots and kills Giko’s American lover, named, with a wink and a nod, Nixon after he discovers the two in bed together. Unconsummated, I should add. After this homicide of passion, the twosome—more partners-in-crime than physical lovers—set off on a road trip of delinquency, a scenic odyssey of stolen cars and gas, half-hearted suicidal gestures, shootouts with cops, exploding cars, wanted posters, occasional piercing bursts into song, and a lot of meandering existential dialogue. This is a New Wave film after all.
Giko (Miyabi Ichijô) at Nixon’s
With his angsty, pouty sneer, daydreamy demeanor punctured by random acts of violence, and relentless alienated nihilism (“I’m nobody,” he frequently asserts), Tamura’s Utamaro is impossible to watch without thinking of French New Wave’s equally aberrant heartthrob Jean-Paul Belmondo. Likewise, Godard’s influence looms large here, ranging from subtle nods like the artful, sometimes to the level of precious, staging of the duo against a seaside vista to glaringly obvious references such as the greenlit bedroom scene in which Giko appears wrapped up in a tape measure, which draws directly from Godard’s gem-toned Pierrot le Fou. Even the paint-splattered Greco-Roman statuary that fills Nixon’s bizarro home recalls the looming gods in Contempt. However, it would be a mistake to chalk Bye Bye Love up to a lesser New Wave wannabe. Fujisawa’s first and only feature is much, much weirder—and queerer—than anything Godard ever made, revealing, at least to me, just how straight those French New Wave flicks really are. And it’s the pioneering character of Giko and the film’s not only prescient but delightfully off-kilter treatment of gender identity that should inspire viewers to write obsessive thank-you letters (or psychotic love notes) to whoever discovered a copy in a film lab warehouse in 2018 after it was presumed missing for decades.
Like Utamaro, Giko is a con artist who admits in a voiceover: “I don’t like to work so I live off of others. I buy everything with other people’s money.” Rather than a social outcast by choice, what sets Giko apart is their (for lack of a better pronoun) gender fluidity. As seen in a reverse timeline slideshow of black and white photographs retracing the steps of their gender transformation, Giko was assigned male at birth and now presents (mostly) as a woman. Despite being made around 50 years ago, Bye Bye Love doesn’t treat Giko’s gender as a freakish anomaly or rely on tired conventions. This isn’t a “born in the wrong” body narrative, an exhausted coming out story, or a case of gender panic as Utamaro seems more fascinated by Giko’s freewheeling approach to identity than horrified at discovering their member. “Why aren’t you a woman?” he asks. They snap, “Why do I need to be a woman?” Like this retort, the film’s dialogue delves into Giko’s unique conception of gender, equating gender with both fantasy and artificiality. “I’m not putting on lipstick. I’m imagining how things might be,” they say as they put on makeup in a shattered mirror in the middle of tall grasses.
Makeup as artificiality, though, is for beginners. Giko’s philosophy veers towards more extremes like comparing themselves to inanimate objects, mirrored by Fujisawa’s occasional placement of Giko as an object among objects, nestled in a pile of tetrapods or sitting on a car with their head shoved in a closed umbrella. Lest you worry that this is objectifying, Giko identifies overtly with objects in their concluding and most revealing monologue: “I’m not a man or a woman. I’m nobody. Right now, I’m the aluminum alloy nose cone of a jet going 1300 mph” or, my favorite, “There’s no difference between me and a high heel.” They’re right. Like a high heel, Giko is beautiful, erotic, enigmatic, sharp, a bit dangerous, and ultimately just another form of matter. No wonder Utamaro is smitten.
Giko (Miyabi Ichijô) and Utamaro (Ren Tamura) in Fujisawa Isao’s Bye Bye Love
Not that it’s easy for Giko to stand strong among all the normies. The film surrounds Giko with reminders of binary Western beauty ideals. Fujisawa isn’t exactly subtle with dramatic shots of tacky and uncanny female store mannequins, makeup ads in magazines, and the six-pack abs on the Greco-Roman hunks in Nixon’s home, which Giko and Utamaro shatter in a rage. Live cis women too—Utamaro picks up a curvier babe in a yellow bikini swimming at the pool in his and Giko’s momentary motel hideout, to which Giko responds by flinging themselves into the water in their clothes. This leads to an artsy interlude in which the woman writhes sensually on a bed. Fujisawa’s closeups increasingly transform her body into nebulous skin landscapes, from recognizable bits like an armpit, hip bones, and a bumpy nasty tongue to just folds and expanses of flesh. Yet, this woman is not exempt from womanhood as a performance as she also has a monologue about a woman being “like an actress on a screen because her life is all appearances. If there is any real emotion, it comes from mimicry.”
Hooking up in a hotel doesn’t mean that Utamaro is any less smitten with Giko as a barely missed bullet to the head attests when they try to sneak out. Don’t worry, Giko gives as good as they get. Later, Giko asks if Utamaro loves them. “I love you more than anyone,” he responds. Then, Giko rams a knife through his palm, pinning his hand to the table, and twists it. Ah…these two kooky love birds! Aside from this penetration, their love affair is mostly platonic even with Utamaro’s lothario sex references: “What is more fun, porn or actual sex?” “Whatever’s dirtier.” I say mostly platonic, as Bye Bye Love boasts one of the most berserk sex scenes put on film. Hiring a sex worker to rid uninterested Giko of their nagging virginity card (“So you guys are queer, huh?” she remarks), Utamaro decides to help induce a spark—quite literally, by wrapping all three of them in wires from a nearby radio and lamp in order to electrocute each other when they embrace. ZZZZT! There’s no better indication of a death drive than licking live wires! Of course, it’s hard to mention a threesome in an on-the-lam road movie without thinking of The Doom Generation. Bye Bye Love does, in many ways, foresee Gregg Araki’s teenage apocalypse classic, but I’d argue that erotic electrocution is much more deliriously demented than anything in that film.
Granted, not all of Bye Bye Love is as electrifying. At points, like most New Wave flicks, the film drags and drags as the duo blab and banter. Then, there’s the madness-inducing continual recurrence of the purposefully migraine-inducing blasting organ version of Bach’s “Toccata and Fugue in D minor, BWV 565,” which will have viewers with any scrap of sanity left begging for mercy. For those with the auditory fortitude to withstand this ceaseless sonic assault, Bye Bye Love provides a gender-bending twist on the inevitable and predictable blood-soaked ending, perfect for a true romance as parasitic, all-consuming, and identity-shifting as Giko and Utamaro’s.