../funeral-parade-of-roses-2

Funeral Parade of Roses

At a glance...

I swear to god one day I will watch this movie under normal conditions. The first time I was at a screening in a tiny theater on a busy street corner with no air-conditioning, where it was so crowded and hot that the whole theater immediately rushed to the exits at the film's conclusion. It was sweaty, uncomfortable, and I couldn't really read the subtitles very well, and I came away thinking this movie was a masterpiece.

This time, I watched in a masked screening outdoors1 where a friend projected the film onto a big screen that was corded taut across the whole wall of their outdoor carport. There was wind that blew the screen around a little, it got really cold the longer we sat there, the audio was really quiet because there wasn't a functional speaker larger than the onboard speakers on the projector, and I still left the screening thinking this movie is a masterpiece. Even as a pseudo-silent film, the interviews visually interrupt the chaotic visual movement of the story, and the dramatic changes in sound become much more noticed. The speakers sounded almost blown out during the really loud musical sequences with the comical clown music, even though they hardly produced enough volume to sound throughout the carport.

Maybe most importantly, this screening I was sitting with a group of friends who had various accessibility needs to see the film. I suspect, for at least some of the audience, this was a movie they wouldn't normally be able to watch in a theater screening where no one is going to discuss content warnings and the like before the film, or warn the audience during the film when it was time to step out of the theater. I will admit, I had to resist a desire to defend the artistic decisions of Funeral Parade of Roses because it's easy to make a lot of assumptions about a person's reasons for needing content warnings ahead of time. I'm not certain I even fully stopped myself from asking a pointed question or two about the need for essentially spoiling the most thrilling part of the film ahead of time. But I got over myself, because the alternative for someone who is in this position is that they just simply never see the film. And that would be a shame for a couple of reasons.

First, Funeral Parade of Roses does not reserve all of its best moments for its most gruesome. In fact, so much violent conflict in this is abstracted, in a way I sort of describe in my first review. When the film needs it, violence simmers and seethes and lurks, breaking the surface on occasion when it decides it's really critical. So much of this movie lives within the vignette and meta-vignette of the daily lives of queer and trans people2. The environments of these vignettes are steeped in the atmosphere of political violence that surrounds the particular historical moment of the film, but that setting does not subsume the human and the humane. While I do believe the film is clearly a more complete artwork without omitting its most violent endings, it still can have something to offer to the viewer up until those points.

Second, the movie actually acknowledges its own horror and this was made so comical given the specific context of this viewing. After the big reveal happens at the end and necks are slit and eyes are stabbed, the film hard-cuts to a man in a chair who faces straight ahead towards the camera and says something to the effect of, "phew, that was awful. I hope the next movie is a little bit nicer :)". The movie has been playing with the combined forces of narrative verisimilitude and meta-narrative tricksterism for the preceding hour, so of course it would apply this push-and-pull on its most dramatic and horrifying image at the end. Honestly, it felt so playful. Admittedly, I have the benefit of having seen the movie before and not feeling the same need to have strict boundaries on certain subject matter, so maybe it wouldn't have felt playful for those who did struggle with that. But for me, I was astounded because it truly took me by surprise. It's like the film is perfectly crafted to conceal this little joke to maximum effect, even for someone who has seen the film before.

Really glad we got to watch this again even in less-than-ideal conditions and perhaps with more distinct requirements required for the screening than usual. I am trying to refuse the call of the void that is preemptively writing a defense of stuff like content warnings in media. I don't know that I would be super excited to go through this kind of process in a public screening, but I think movies at home with friends is maybe the perfect place to speak candidly about these things and normalize the practice of talking about access needs.3 For the detractors, I will simply point to the fact that I was not the only person who sat through the entire runtime outside in the cold to watch this screening, and certainly some folks got to watch more of this movie than they would have otherwise. If we were talking about Die Hard 5, I would guess it wouldn't be worth the trouble, but in my opinion it definitely is worth it for this film, and I'm glad I could participate in this little carport screening.


1

If you're curious about why I would bother watching a movie outside while wearing a mask, it's because COVID is still real! The viral load that we see in wastewater data, the only data we have left to track this stuff, is at the same volumes that we had pre-vaccine and pre-"end of the pandemic". If you're curious I invite you to read this article from the South Seattle Emerald about being COVID cautious even in 2025, or this very thorough and excellent zine as a starting resource. We keep us safe, which means it's on us to build resilient communities of care, and that means taking reasonable steps to protecting ourselves and our loved ones from a viral respiratory illness (of which vaccination alone is insufficient).

2

I know they are referred to as gay boys in the text of the film, but everything about what these gay boys describe in their interviews resonates so deeply with me as a trans woman that I don't think anyone should be surprised that I'm calling them trans in my interpretation of the film.

3

I acknowledge by saying this I might piss off both people who don't want anyone to ever see anything like a content warning anywhere near their favorite movies and also people who want actual theaters to start doing something like this to make films more accessible for more people. I used to put content warnings in my reviews for movies that seemed like they obviously needed them, but I will say even doing that got a little confusing because I became uncertain on when something warranted a content warning. My gut instinct is to have deference to those with the accessibility needs. Something I am constantly reminding myself is that needing content warnings for, for example, suicide in films is not necessarily because the person thinks its immoral to depict suicide in film. Rather, in my experience it just means they know themselves and know that seeing suicide on screen is liable to bring up a lot of bad feelings specific to their experience in life that makes the film unpleasant or even not worth seeing. I honestly don't know how to argue with that and don't really want to. Maybe the issue would be more pressing to me if all the theaters around me started doing content warning disclosures before screenings, and I will admit I would probably choose a screening without content warnings because I don't have those kinds of needs and would still prefer to not really know ahead of time too much about the film. Ah, I don't know, I'm sort of rambling down here but I guess I'll just say the intention of my original statement was more to be in relationship to the status quo, where basically none of the screenings I've seen in theaters really said much of anything about content warnings before the movie.

/1969/ /5 stars/ /rewatch/ /it's about your dad/