Stout Hearts

By RICHARD CORLISS

MERRY CHRISTMAS, MR. LAWRENCE Directed by Nagisa Oshima Written by Nagisa Oshima and Paul Mayersberg

Java, 1942. A P.O.W. camp, where men are men--except for the Japanese guards, who are wily beasts. Through the sweltering days and ominous nights, three British prisoners run variations on the national character. Hicksley-Ellis (Jack Thompson) conducts his impotent belligerence by the book; ragged, resilient Jack Celliers (David Bowie) has the clear eyes and defiant smirk of a Kipling hero; Lawrence (Tom Conti), the camp translator, is an Oxbridgian humanist seeking a tunnel into the Oriental mind. Men are strong; men are shot; men fight on for their peculiar codes of honor. This is an art-house Bridge on the River Kwai, with neither bridge nor river, only a fatal, futile game that each side plays with different rules.

As he did in the superb erotic melodrama In the Realm of the Senses (1976), Japanese Writer-Director Nagisa Oshima is portraying--for Western viewers and his own Westernized countrymen--the social compulsions that once made Japan unique, and uniquely feared. In the earlier film, a prostitute and the husband of a brothel owner become casual lovers and then, following the logic of exclusive devotion, swoon into a passion whose fulfillment is violent death. In Merry Christmas, the viewer is thrown al once into the sadomasochistic excess of Oriental machismo. Here, every gesture of discipline, compassion, rage and honor is expressed by the blade of a Japanese officer's sword. Firing squads shoot blanks at condemned men; Japanese soldiers are decapitated as part of the hara-kiri ceremony; Geneva conventions are defied with a twitch of the captain's jaw muscle--all as ancient rituals of purification.

The performances are tense and knowing, including that of Ryuichi Sakamoto, who plays the young captain (he also composed the film's haunting score). But the Merry Christmas catalogue of atrocities finally becomes numbing, even udicrous. Oshima describes the wartime Japanese as ''a nation of anxious people who could do nothing individually--so they went mad en masse." Alas, he does not explain that madness; he only puts it on horrific display. --By Richard Corliss This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.