BY Janet Maslin
First Posted: The New York Times, Aug 26 Friday, 1983
DAVID BOWIE plays a born leader in Nagisa Oshima's ''Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence,'' and he plays him like a born film star. Mr. Bowie's screen presence here is mercurial and arresting, and he seems to arrive at this effortlessly, though he manages to do something slyly different in every scene. The demands of his role may sometimes be improbable and elaborate, but Mr. Bowie fills them in a remarkably plain and direct way. Little else in the film is so unaffected or clear.
''Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence,'' which opens today at the Baronet and the Bay Cinema, is sometimes tense and surprising, sometimes merely bizarre. It's an intriguing if inconsistent effort, by the director of ''In the Realm of the Senses ,'' to use a Japanese-run prisoner-of-war camp as a means of exploring the bewildering nature of war. In Java, in 1942, the British lieutenant colonel of the title (Tom Conti) is reunited with Jack Celliers (Mr . Bowie), a major from New Zealand whose powers of self-control and defiance seem to know no bounds. Lawrence, who understands his Japanese captors far better than any of his comrades do, must look on in helpless understanding as they marvel at Celliers's remarkable strength of spirit and ultimately respond to it with savagery and fear.
''They're a nation of anxious people, and they could do nothing individually, so they went mad en masse,'' Lawrence says of the Japanese. The two main Japanese characters who have brought him to this understanding are Sergeant Hara (Takeshi ), a brutal figure who taunts Lawrence while also admiring him, and Captain Yonoi (Ryuichi Sakamoto), the handsome young camp commander, who has a fierce belief in the samurai code. Both of these actors perform at an obvious disadvantage, since their English is awkward and the motives of their characters are imperfectly revealed. However, they are able to convey the complex affinity that exists between captors and prisoners, a point that is made most touchingly in a brief postwar coda.
''Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence'' can be brutal and blunt, not just in its scenes of hara-kiri (there are several of these) but in its occasionally stilted execution. The screenplay, by Mr. Oshima and Paul Mayersberg, has a curiously dislocated quality. Though it's based on a novel (''The Seed and the Sower'') by Laurens van der Post, the film seems almost more Japanese in its New Zealand sequences than it does in the prison camp.
These scenes, which are flashbacks to Celliers's boyhood, involve the way in which he feels he has wronged his brother, who is an angelic-looking blond boy with a beautiful singing voice and a hunchback. This exceedingly odd anecdote, more consistent with the film's code of honor than with Celliers's probable history, is most remarkable for Mr. Bowie's ability to stand side by side with a boy of 10 or so, both of them sporting school blazers, and somehow pass for a slightly older brother.
Mr. Conti has some fine moments here, too, but his is the more passive and less mysterious role. He is also saddled with some of the film's more simplistic dialogue, and some of its more obscure responses. ''Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence '' is closer to a curiosity than to a triumph, though its conception is certainly ambitious. Mr. Oshima has staged the film in a spacious tropical setting and filled it with a great number of extras. Even so, Mr. Bowie always stands out from the crowd.
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