Mamoru Oshii is known most for his work in animation, to the point his live-action creations are generally overlooked by the masses. Everyone knows The Ghost in the Shell thanks to his 1995 adaptation. They know his Urusei Yatsura film Beautiful Dreamer, or maybe Angel’s Egg. But as a high-concept, avant-garde, live-action sci-fi director? The association is far less common, despite films like The Red Spectacles showing an entirely-unique side not just of the director, but the broader genre from which he has specialized during his career.
While inspirations from stories like The Terminator are obvious in its initial synopsis and broader world building, the actual film takes cues from more unusual cinematic creations. Set in a dystopian future, the Panzer Police have been established by the Japanese government as a means of dealing with growing civil unrest, their existence as an augmented and militarized unit with the authority to use force on those who disobey. After the use of excessive force kills a misdemeanor criminal, legal trials lead to the eventual outlawing of this special unit, with those assigned to the unit hounded up and disposed of. The film opens with one of these final units of three officers being cornered by bounty hunters inside an abandoned facility, with only Koichi Todome (Shigeru Chiba) fleeing with the promise to return for his comrades.
Three years pass, and Koichi returns to Tokyo with the hope of fulfilling this promise, a dog without a master in the age of cats facing a city unrecognizable than that which he once knew.
Rather than the bombast this high-intensity opening scene would suggest, The Red Spectacles has far more in common with the surrealism of the French New Wave than your typical action story. We are placed in Koichi's shoes from the moment he returns to Tokyo, disoriented by the city viewed through its sepia-toned filter that emphasizes the depressive air of hopelessness, grime and corruption of a city transformed in his absence. This isn’t the home he once knew, and even the friends he reaches out to for help are not to be trusted in this new age.
While I wouldn’t wish to call Oshii’s animated works simplistic, this is comparatively far more unusual than his more mainstream anime work, doing away with any sense of formal structure to deconstruct the nature of this story into its pure non-linear essence in a way challenges and contorts wildly from scene to scene. If anything, the search for Koichi’s lost comrades becomes a journey through the soul of a cop who placed his faith in the institution he once served, only to be deemed unworthy and forced to take the fall for his superiors. The Red Spectacles is a portrait of a perpetrator of state-sanctioned violence forced to question if anything he did was just when the state he served and the friends he protected could be corrupted so easily. Can peace and safety ever truly come from violent means?
It asks this by refusing to play any scene straight or in convention to typical filmmaking convention. Slapstick plays out suddenly as an homage to Seijun Suzuki and films like Branded to Kill, where even a moment of simple action can be interrupted by jarring dance breaks or breaks for beer before resuming a murderous, bloody fight. Comedic skits feature soba noodles bringing near-orgasmic joy for our protagonist. These are more than silly comedy sketches interspersed meaninglessly into action to break up the monotony of affairs: while their inclusion is deliberately jarring to the audience, they also remind us of the human behind the Kerberos, otherwise ground down by a society that has fallen apart around him.
It’s a fascinating back and forth between bleak straight-talking philosophy and stupidity that plays out via seemingly-disconnected vignettes into this changed world, often theatrically to the point of quoting Shakespeare and speaking to the camera as though us viewers are an actively-participating audience. In many ways, we are. This is a world far removed from our own, but this merely forces us to grind our brains into placing this world into the context of our own experiences. It turns out this wretched future isn’t that far removed from our own, and thus the question falls on us to work out how best to proceed.
Importantly, the film never condones the violence that led to the police corp's dissolution. Rather, it abstracts this incident for an absurdist chicken-and-egg, circling on the core philosophical construct of this hypothetical society. Does a society decline and fall into unrest because of higher authorities enforcing irrevocable decline, or is it the reverse? Do people selfishly turn inwards rather than collectively to their fellow human for their own gain, enacting policies that fester in a growing roy at society's core that inevitably leads to widespread unrest? The film never really answers this, but it certainly ponders the scenario, and it lingers with viewers long after it rather unsatisfactorily ends without any resolution to this central doubt.
Koichi’s question as he returns to the city and is betrayed by those he held close is that of his role in actualizing this new society. Did his violent life as a militarized police force come as a way to quash dissent, or was this merely a cruel manifestation of distrust that failed to understand the concerns that truly mattered? Is that why everything is like this now? If nothing else, the whole world is rotten to its core, and that at least needs major introspection from everyone before change can occur.
Oshii in live-action fascinates by using the minimal budget he is offered to create a dystopian noir via abstraction, with paranoia and decay at the core of The Red Spectacles as it asks what it means to live in a society, and if any society is doomed to eventually fall into this selfish decline?
Nearly 40 years later, the film is somewhat overlooked compared to the director’s critically-acclaimed and internationally-beloved anime works, including this film’s animated prequel, Jin-Roh. Yet while that is undoubtedly still a good film, it is a far more straightforward look into these ideas. For many years, this obscure 1987 curio failed to receive any sort of updated release, until a recent crowdfunded 4K remaster made its debut in cinemas across Japan in late March.
This was the film’s first ever nationwide theatrical release, having previously only released in select independent theaters upon its initial 1987 release.
Perhaps, with Japan at its current crossroads, the timing for such a remaster couldn’t be better. While we’re far from the 1960s decade of unrest that even upon its release was notable but fading from memory, the questions of what purpose a society can serve to its people and what roles people can take for the betterment of all resonate to a country grappling with broad societal issues like an aging population and changing economy as it figures out what's next.
If nothing else, this is a chance to revisit an oft-overlooked but no-less valuable classic from a famed Japanese director’s filmography. Many of the ideas tackled in this film are reflected in the approach taken by Oshii in adapting The Ghost in the Shell. More than merely serving as a point of comparison to his other works, though, this is an avant-garde wonder that deserves to be celebrated on its own merits for how it challenges its audience in ways few others films have emulated since.
