Pure Emotions of the Sea (海の純情, Seijun Suzuki, 1956)

Posted on by

Directed under his birth name Seitaro, Seijun Suzuki’s second film Pure Emotions of the Sea (海の純情, Umi no Junjo) is essentially a vehicle for pop star Hachiro Kasuga who plays a character with the same and sings several of his popular hits including Otomi-san which eventually sold over a million copies. Perhaps precisely because of its nature as a 45-minute programme picture, Suzuki was able to get away with quite a lot of the nonsense that would become his signature style in an otherwise anarchic tale of a romantically troubled whaler and the improbable number of women who love him.

Hachiro is the harpoon operator on a whale boat, but it’s mainly women’s hearts that he seems to be piercing. While he seems to have feelings for captain’s daughter Kazue (Toshie Takada), he also attracts the attentions of Miyoko (Tomoko Ko), daughter of the head of the shipping company, local sex worker Yumi (Miki Odagiri), and “judo-geisha” Suzugiku (Kyoko Akemi). His various encounters encourage him to swear off women, but this is quite a small town and he can’t avoid them entirely. Eventually, Miyoko suggests that perhaps she, Yumi, and Suzugiku could divide Hachiro in three with Yumi taking his money, Suzugiku his heart, and Miyoko his throat for his singing voice. After some rather macabre discussions about how to get his heart out of his body, they settle on a time share arrangement instead with each of them having Hachiro for eight hours of the day, though Hachiro’s thoughts don’t seem to enter into it.

Conversely, ambitious rudder-operator Goro is interested in all these women too, though for largely cynical reasons. With the captain’s position weakened he’s angling to take over, though is unpopular with just about everyone except Yumi who feigns taking her own life to get his attention when he starts trying to woo Suzugiku, who doesn’t like him at all. He seems to be a kind of parody of the ambitious salaryman, even giving hair tonic to his balding boss in the hope of currying favour. The other sailors, however, seem to see Hachiro as a natural successor, though the captain isn’t so sure and particularly hates his habit of singing all the time. There’s a minor irony in the fact that Suzugiku often carries a portable radio to listen to Hachiro’s songs, making her a representative of modernity rather than the emblem of traditional culture one might expect a geisha to be. She even plays records of Hachiro rather than playing the shamisen much to Captain Eizo’s (Jushiro Kobayashi) consternation. According to him, geisha aren’t what they used to be. Not only are there “judo-geisha” but dancing geisha and mahjong geisha too.

Eizo’s grumpiness and harsh treatment of his men is one reason given for the boat’s declining fortunes, with Hachiro posited as a more cheerful presence who could boot their morale, though he’s more dopey than anything else and preoccupied with his romantic difficulties. Thus it’s not surprising that Eizo’s position is under threat or that he mildly resents Hachiro though picking up on his daughter’s obvious fondness for him. Nevertheless, he will eventually have to make way for the next generation, handing his captain’s jacket over to Hachiro in addition to accepting him as a potential son-in-law.

Suzuki, however, takes a rather roundabout route to get there embracing an absurdist sensibility and sense of cartoonish fun. He opens the film with an ethnographic voiceover reminiscent of a travel programme and then cuts to Miyoko away at university studying whales and introducing herself to the camera as a kind of guide to the weird fishing village, though she is not the protagonist of the film and only resurfaces halfway through as a love rival. He also adds in surrealist touches such as frequent cuts to classical statues during Suzugiku’s judo routine. When she shows off her techniques, she throws Goro straight through a wall leaving a man-shaped hole behind, while she later deflects his romantic attentions by punting him right to the top of a tall tower at the beach. Suzuki also uses small stretches of whale-themed animation to add to the childish sense of fun while simultaneously ignoring the bloodiness of Hachiro’s job as a whale hunter. Probably, he could only get away with all this precisely because it was a 45-minute kayo eiga pop song movie intended as a programme filler, but still there are hints at what would become his signature style in his distinctive composition and absurdist sense of humour.

The Distributors (유포자들, Hong Seok-ku, 2022)

Posted on by

When Yu-bin (Park Sung-hoon) finds himself being blackmailed after being drugged in a club and videoed by an attractive young woman, he can’t help but feel hard done by. A teacher who once aspired to making films, he’s on the verge of marrying his fiancée Sun-ae (Kim So-eun) who is from an incredibly wealthy and very conservative pro-Japanese family, but if any of this gets out he can kiss his comfortable life goodbye. His focus is not, however, on how he shouldn’t have gone to his friend’s night club after promising Sun-ae he wouldn’t, but how he can cover all this up so she doesn’t find out he took two girls back to their flat when she was away on a business trip.

Hong Seok-ku’s The Distributors (유포자들, Yoopojadeul) never quite keys in to the fact that its hero’s a bit of a slimeball who nevertheless thinks he’s a good guy, and more often than not falls into his hard done by mindset. This might, however, echo the perspective of the average man in a society in which illicit photography has become a hot-button issue. As the film opens, Yu-bin is inflicting corporal punishment on two boys who’ve been caught taking inappropriate videos of women, which is perhaps not the best way to deal with this issue. Though he emphasises that they’ve done wrong, he’s also sort of on their side in that he agrees not to take this any further in case it damages their futures. Ji-ho, in particular, is on track to get into Seoul University and Yu-bin can’t really work out why he might have done something like this. The other boy Seong-min, happens to be his fiancée’s younger brother and predictably blames everything on Ji-ho.

It is then quite ironic that Yu-bin finds himself a victim of a video taken without his consent that shows him in a compromising position. Seven years earlier, he’d been accused of posting revenge porn after a former girlfriend broke up with him and had to pay her legal compensation. He claims that he didn’t intentionally leak it, but that his friend Sang-beom (Song Jin-woo) found it on his computer and uploaded it to the internet to make money on amateur porn sites. But again, his focus is more on how to make this go away rather than the harm he may have caused to Ga-young. She tells him that her life’s been ruined and that it’s pure hell to feel as if everyone’s looking at you wondering if they’ve seen the video. He, however, offers her money and suggests they settle this “like civilised people”, which is in itself not so different from blackmail while suggesting that she’s being unreasonable in not letting the matter drop.

Meanwhile, what Yu-bin might actually be worried about is that he’s made a tape of him and Sun-ae that she may not even know about or have consented to. In any case, his carelessness has meant that this video too might end up online ruining her life in the same way as Ga-young’s while the consequences for him are only mild humiliation and the breaking of his engagement. It’s not exactly clear how he and Sun-ae ended up meeting, but there’s a mild implication that he’s only really with her for the luxury lifestyle she provides while her father, who objects to the marriage because Yu-bin is not of their social class, also offers him career advancement in sponsoring a film department at the school. 

The blackmailer, Yu-bin, and his friend Sang-beom all make ironic references to this being like a Hitchcock movie, though Yu-bin is not really a “wrong man” so much as one running away from his own cowardice and imperfections. In his film class, he shows the children Kim Ki-young’s The Housemaid, which is certainly an ironic choice given that it ends with a direct message warning men of the dangers of adultery and to always remember their duties to their family as husbands and fathers. Even Yu-bin’s sadly looking out through a rainy window echoes Kim’s cinematography, though Yu-bin is still in the mindset of feeling sorry for himself rather than coming to the realisation that even if it’s not Ga-young who is punishing him, he has never really faced his role in what happened to her or accepted responsibility for his failure to safeguard her privacy. Only now, when it’s him, does he begin to understand not only that he’s been selfish but that he’s failed in his role as a teacher by not figuring out what was going on with the boys and the videos while focussing on protecting their futures rather than those of the young women around them who deserve safety and respect but are provided little of either by a male-dominated society.

Trailer (English subtitles)

The Butcher’s Blade (手遮天, Liu Wenpu, 2026)

Posted on by

Laws are meaningless if no one’s prepared to enforce them. According to the opening titles of The Butcher’s Blade (手遮天, shǒu zhē tiān), the Song had a complicated criminal code with lots of rules to be followed. However, in the real world, they only really apply to certain people. Xue Buyi (Liu Fengchao) has been a constable for 10 years but has become a bitter, broken man who feels himself to be a coward for remaining complicit with this corrupt regime.

A courtesan reports the local coffin maker for rape and violence having slashed her face and thereby not just physically and psychologically harmed her, but destroyed her livelihood. The courtesans complain they’ve reported him before and that no one helps them because they’re not the sort of people who matter in this world. Buyi announces he’ll get them justice and does indeed arrest the coffin maker, but the villagers then turn against him. The coffin maker is well connected and Buyi’s boss lets him go. The courtesans are unsurprised but disappointed, while Buyi’s self-loathing only deepens. His pride and masculinity are further eroded when he tries to help a woman selling noodles that he’s fond of fend off an exploitative landlord who’s been upping the rent in an attempt to coerce her into a sexual relationship. Wei simply asks him for the money instead, but Buyi has nary a penny to his name. Deliberately humiliating him, Wei makes Buyi drink flasks of soy sauce in exchange for reducing Erniang’s (Gao Weiman) debt which Buyi does until Erniang puts a stop to it.

Given all that, it’s easy to see why he might turn to the dark side and allow this world to remake him in its image. The war inside him is between his upbringing as a pupil of Eagle Hall, a brutal police training facility designed to churn out thugs who heartlessly carry out the will of the powers that be, and his natural compassion which baulks at the brutal torture and murder expected of him as a law enforcement official. Buyi is directly contrasted with former colleague Li Zhen (Yuan Fufu) who is keen to get him back on side and working for Eagle Hall, while Buyi struggles with himself over the degree of moral comprise he’s comfortable accepting to be one of Huang’s elite policemen. By remaining complicit, he hopes he can get the money to save Erniang’s noodle stall and protect her from Wei, but she quite obviously can’t stand what Buyi is becoming and didn’t envisage having brutal policemen as her main clientele.

There seems to be a subversive allusion to the present day in the world that surrounds Buyi which is filled with corrupt officials and supported by a rotten regime that policemen like him prop up with thuggish authoritarianism, serving the interests of the powerful over those of the people. Buyi finds himself at the centre of conspiracy when he takes a job guarding government funds intended for disaster relief in the hope of getting extra money to help Erniang only to be accused of robbing the place himself. Recruited by former mentor Huang (Chunyu Shanshan), he witnesses his indifference to the disaster victims who have largely fallen into exploitation at the hands of corrupt landowner Wei. Huang plans to sacrifice them for his own personal gain by framing them as a revolutionary army led by a rival official seeking to overturn the regime which he will then heroically surpress. 

Buyi, however, has to decide whether he can really continue going along with all this or rise up to resist it. Liu Wenpu frames Buyi’s intervention in heroic terms in which he’s surrounded by an eerie blue glow and the sound of firecrackers as he finally decides that he can’t let people like Huang continue with their authoritarianism and indifference towards the welfare of the people. His rebellion, however, seems to make himself something of an outlaw condemned to a life of wandering while ultimately pointless. Huang was just one many and now others are trying to use his fate as a means of advancing their own position. The elegantly choreographed fight scenes take on a symbolic quality as Buyi progresses towards his showdown with Huang while battling himself and his inner conflict, torn between the what it takes to succeed in a world as corrupt as this and his essential humanity before finally coming down on the side of justice for all rather than continuing to serve the interests of an exploitative elite.

The Butcher’s Blade is released on Digital in the US on May 4 courtesy of Well Go USA.

Trailer (English subtitles)

A New Love in Tokyo (愛の新世界, Banmei Takahashi, 1994)

Posted on by

Life is theatre in Banmei Takahashi’s A New Love in Tokyo (愛の新世界, Ai no Shinsekai). Strangely marketed in some quarters as a kind of sequel to Ryu Murakami’s Tokyo Decadence though it is entirely unconnected to it, Banmei Takahashi’s after hours drama is a breezy riot that runs in direct contrast to other post-Bubble era movies which saw only despair and disillusionment in economic stagnation. For Rei (Sawa Suzuki) and Ayumi (Reiko Kataoka), however, life is one long party that they live on their own terms hoping to ride the wave all the way to the sea.

That said, it’s true that Rei, at least, is doing her dominatrix job because it’s impossible to support oneself as an artist in this economy. She is, in fact, basically subsidising her whole theatre troupe through sex work as a means of keeping it going. Her relationship to the men in the group is almost like Snow White and the Seven Dwarves while, for unexplained reasons, she sleeps with each of her dopey castmates on a rota system. It’s not until crunch time that they realise they should probably get jobs too, while the only other woman in the group (Yoko Nakajima) takes a job as a receptionist answering the phone at the call girl agency where Ayumi works.

Rei often runs into Ayumi leaving hotels and the pair soon become fast friends, though unlike Rei, Ayumi is a regular sex worker who sleeps with her clients. Nevertheless, Rei seems to like her precisely because, as she puts it, she’s a good liar, which is perhaps what you need to be to be successful at this business. She manipulates her clients by pretending to be a shy virgin so they pay her more for basic services, while lying to her boyfriend that she’s an office lady. The fact he takes it at face value suggests he might not be all that bright, which is why he’s struggling to finish his exams to become a doctor. Later, she’s thrown him over for a lad training to be a lawyer but just with as much success. Both the men she ends up with seem to be feckless and dim, though she fluffs their egos by pretending to be stupid. She says that her end goal is to become the wife of a professional lawyer or doctor, which is to say she’s looking for class status and respectability, though she’s probably earning more than they are by herself already. Ayumi has a host of savings pots and sometimes transfers large sums of money into one telling her boyfriend it’s from her father to help pay for a wedding.

Which is to say, everyone here is playing a kind of role. Both Rei and Ayumi seem to be using their real names for their work, but as Rei says the dominatrix gig is good for her acting career in allowing her to take on multiple personas. She too writes frequent letters home to her mother which bear little relation to reality in which she claims to be a therapist’s receptionist. But the clients are acting too, because this is, after all, all about role play. One of Rei’s most devoted customers is a yakuza who bosses his men around all day then comes to her to be punished. He is scrupulously polite and really rather sweet, buying up all the tickets to Rei’s play to make sure she’s not embarrassed on the opening night. Generally speaking, the streams shouldn’t cross between Rei the actress and Rei the dominatrix, so the yakuza is crossing a line by intruding on her personal life at the play, though he does so in an otherwise respectful way, apologising for his presence and making it clear that he doesn’t mean to expose her to those who might not know nor does he intend to encroach any further on her personal life.

Another of the women’s clients seems to be a fed up salaryman ranting about his boss and company lay-offs, hinting at the stressfulness of the economic situation for those working outside of the sex industry as well as the emasculating nature of corporate life in which the salaryman can only vent his frustrations through BDSM role-play rather than by actually taking it up with his boss. Rei and Ayumi are, by contrast, free from any such concerns. That is not to say, however, that their lives are easy or without danger. When a sex worker is found dead in a love hotel bathroom, a gloom falls over the industry. Rei asks Ayumi if she’s feeling alright, but as it turns out her agency has spotted a business opportunity seeing as most of the others will have decided to close for the sake for safety and as a gesture of respect. Ayumi too is threatened by a customer with a knife and is only saved by the arrival of a yakuza, in an unexpected cameo from ice cool V-Cinema star Show Aikawa, who intimidates the customer into backing off by eating his own sunglasses. Nevertheless, Ayumi goes straight back to work to meet the next customer, unwilling to let herself be cowed by male violence.

That’s something she has in common with Rei who similarly treats the attempts of men to ruin her night with similar disdain. When one customer proves rebellious, she keeps him waiting for hours while tied up and bound in the dark. She and Ayumi try turning the tables by visiting a host club, but are instantly put off by their poor quality patter. They go on a kind of date with two guys who tried to pick them up, but dump them when they’ve had enough. Rei, in particular, has several boyfriends who think they have some sort of claim on her body and her time, but she only ever does as she pleases. There’s something unexpectedly joyful about the two women running hand in hand through the midnight city, as if this were only ever their playground. The juxtaposition of the erotic photographs taken of actress Sawa Suzuki by Nobuyoshi Araki and those of her childhood hint at this quality of playfulness, as if her life were one of fun games in which she’s never quite grown up. They also remind us, however, of her ordinariness. She had a childhood too, and is, in fact, just like everyone else. Her job is just a job, no different from those of the guys at her theatre troupe who work in restaurants and video stores. She and Ayumi even exchange business cards. This festival might be over now, but that only means it’s time to start preparing for the next in the company of her friends as she and Ayumi enjoy their lives in the permanent dawn of a city that seems to exist only for them.

Trailer (English subtitles)

The Outsiders (孽子, Yu Kan-Ping, 1986)

Posted on by

Released at the tail end of martial law, Yu Kan-Ping’s adaptation of Pai Hsien-Yung’s seminal novel Crystal Boys seems to anticipate a coming liberation, but also perhaps that even then not all will be free. The film’s Chinese title, Unfilial Sons (孽子, nièzǐ), hints at the way it, in a certain sense, circles back to a kind of conservatism in which the hero must reconcile with his abusive father for cultural rather than personal or psychological reasons. But at the same time, perhaps this reconciliation will be necessary at the time the present regime falls and speaks more of a need for peace as the authoritarian father must learn to accept that he has a gay son and will end his life alone if hex chooses not to do so.

Li Qing’s (Shao Hsin) father is, in many ways, a symbol of the authoritarian regime in that he is a former KMT soldier who came to Taiwan with Chang Kai-Shek after the Chinese civil war. Filled with notions of toxic masculinity, he kicks Qing out when he is expelled from high school after being caught having sex with a male lab assistant. Screaming at him in the street, he calls him a “degenerate” and tells him never to come home. Yet it seems obvious that Qing’s father has no real power and all his abuses stem from just this fact. His son’s homosexuality calls his own manhood into question, while his violence towards his wife also stems from his insecurity that she will leave him for a better man. She eventually does leave him for a trumpet player, abandoning her two sons the youngest of which dies as a direct result of his father’s neglect. 

Though Qing was a wounded, lonely little boy who felt himself rejected by both parents due to his mother’s obvious preference for his brother, he adopts a maternal position that comparable to that shown to him by “Mama Yang” who takes in “homeless birds” or young gay men who’ve been rejected by their birth families and have nowhere else to go. Qing was kicked out not only of his home but the school too, leaving him educationally disadvantaged. He can only earning a living as a sex worker in the Peace Memorial Park which has become a cruising spot for gay men. Pushed out of the mainstream society and left with nowhere to go, they have repurposed this public space as their own but are not safe even in here given the frequency of police raids. Auntie Mann, the former actress who lives with Yang, asks him where these young men are supposed to go if they can no longer go to the park with the consequence that they decide to formalise their situation by selling Yang’s photo studio and the building Mann owns to open a gay nightclub called The Blue Angel.

The club speaks of a need to carve out one’s own space in a hostile society, but also the commodification of gay life that accompanies greater acceptance. The park was free and money could also be earned there, but here the guests will need to pay because this is, after all, a business in addition to being a community hub. It also seems that for whatever reason, policemen are also drinking here, so it is not completely liberated and its existence depends on not offending the authorities. Nevertheless, it otherwise extends the family forged by Yang and Mann to a wider community of queer people by offering them a safer space in which they can be their authentic selves if only for a short time.

This seems to be true for Mann’s former director who seems to make a point of going everywhere with two very young and attractive women hanging on his arms, but abandons them to flirt with men at the club. Closted movie Hua Kuo-Pao similarly seems to have taken a liking to Qing, but must presumably keep his sexuality secret in order to go on working. Dangers are spoken of regarding the potential violence of obsessive love in a repressed community as Yang cautions Qing about entering an affair with Dragon, a man he meets in the park, who killed his lover Phoenix in a crime of passion and has been a wandering soul ever since having convinced himself never to love again because it would only end in death.

Yu frames murder as a moment of gothic madness as fog rises behind the bridge in the park, which was already a space of darkness and depression symbolising the degree to which these men are already isolated within their society. Another of the young men Yang takes in ties to take his own life after his lover kicks him out. Though the others tell him his boyfriend was not worth dying for, the problem seems to be more that being thrown out again convinced him he had nowhere else to go. If it were not for Yang and Auntie Mann, he would be totally alone. There does seem to be, however, a degree of tension in the relationship between Yang and Auntie Mann in which there exists a deep platonic love that cannot be resolved sexually. Just as he saves the boys, Yang also once saved Mann from an addiction to drugs, though he could not save her film career or hope for feminine fulfilment through marriage. The Blue Angel club finally only possible because of Mann’s acceptance that she will never be an actress again nor marry for love. Yang has been a kind of beard for her, helping her save face and avoid the stigma of being an unattached woman by making it look like there was a man in her life, just as she perhaps provided security for him in ways other than allowing him to rent his shop from her cheaply and have a place to live.

So tying into the film’s title, these new support networks play into a heteronormative vision of the family in which Yang becomes a father figure to Qing and teaches him how to live a more fulfilling, safer life as a gay man in contrast to his birth father’s authoritarian attempts at dominance. Another of the boys eventually leaves with a lover to look for their father in Japan, but seemingly struggles to find him reflecting the way in which each of them search for a more positive parental input having been failed or abandoned by their birth families. What they discover is a sense of brotherhood and solidarity that gives them a place to call home within the community. Nevertheless, the film ends with the symbolic gesture of Qing following Yang’s advice and attempting to reconcile with his father though an “unfilial son”, while his father too seems to have pulled himself together and is readier to accept Qing for who he is. This sense of homecoming for the homeless bird may then play into a code of familial obligation which could itself by oppressive, but also signals a new beginning and the opening up of a more liberated era.

The Outsiders screened as part of this year’s Queer East.

Kokkuri (こっくりさん, Takahisa Zeze, 1997)

Posted on by

The tensions between a trio of young women are brought to the fore by an ill-advised consultation with Kokkuri-san in Takahisa Zeze’s atmospheric horror movie. Some more than others, these girls are all haunted if only by adolescent confusion and suppressed desire. Looking for answers with no one turn to in the absence of parental authority, they rely doubly on a late-night radio show, Midnight Blue Bird,  hosted by a girl their age calling herself “Michiru”.

“Michiru” is the heroine of the Japanese version of Blue Bird fairytale about a brother and sister who leave in search of the blue bird of happiness only to return and realise that it was waiting for them at home all along. While the moral of the fairytale might be that happiness is all around us if only you know how to look, there is precious little surrounding the girls outside of their friendship which is already beginning to fracture under the weight of adolescence, not to mention a series of overlapping love triangles.

What neither of the other girls know, is that Michiru is actually a persona constructed by Mio (Ayumi Yamatsu) who is actually the host of the radio show. As Michiru she claims to be sexually experienced and rebellious, answering the questions that come from other young women though, in reality, a regular high schooler and romantically naive. As we gradually become aware, she is in love with her friend Hiroko (Hiroko Shimada), but Hiroko has a crush on Masami’s fickle boyfriend Akira. It was Mio who suggested the Kokkuri-san game on her radio show, a Ouija board style means of divination, but it quickly turns dark with Masami (Moe Ishikawa) manipulating the board to needle Hiroko after realising she’s after her boyfriend.

The resulting fallout pushes Hiroko and Mio towards a confrontation with their shared traumas as survivors of a drowning. Hiroko is haunted by a little girl in red, ironically named “Midori” which means “green”, and struggles to get over the guilt she feels over a childhood friend who drowned in a public bath. Mio, meanwhile, gives contradictory biographical information on her show, but it seems that Mio’s mother intended to take her own life with Mio in tow after she caught her with her new husband to be following the death of Mio’s father. Echoing the central motivation of the film, Mio’s mother suggests the “go together” to where her father is, but later saves Mio alone.

But while Hiroko becomes preoccupied with the notion of sex, vowing to become more like Michiru, she tells Michiro that thanks losing her virginity will change her though she later laments that it’s changed nothing at all. Mio, meanwhile seems to have a hangup having caught her mother with another man. In disgust, she rubs at her libs in the same way that the older Mio later does after finally finding the courage to kiss Hiroko who lips have, by then, been coated in striking red lipstick. The colour red seems to represent the curse of Kokkuri-san and with it repressed guilt, regret, and forbidden desire. Though it seems that by learning to accept herself, publicly unmasking herself on her radio show and confessing her love for Hiroko live on air, Mio alone is able to overcome the curse. The kiss she gives Hiroko is one of life that seems to break the spell and free them both from Kokkuri-san’s trap, though all may not be as it first seems. 

Nevertheless, the fact that Hiroko does not remember makes this something of a private evolution for Mio even as voices from the past resurface and encourage them “go together” toward whatever fate awaits them in the film’s ambiguous conclusion that echoes that of Zeze’s earlier pink tale of frustrated same-sex desire, Angel of September, which shares many of the same themes. Even so, in finally accepting her sister, who is impressed and supportive of her coming out live on air even if she cynically adds it can be her new gimmick, Mio has undergone a transformation into adulthood and symbolically been reborn, emerging from the cleansing waters with greater clarity and self-assurance if perhaps no more certain of what the future may hold.

Trailer (no subtitles)

Angel in September (本番レズ　恥ずかしい体位, Takahisa Zeze, 1994)

Posted on by

According to Hitomi, she and Eriko were once lovers in a past life in which they were angels battling a demon army. She claims that she recognised Eriko at once, though never had the courage to talk to her at school and has only connected with her now after witnessing her transgressive act of stealing a lipstick from a convenience store. Aside from bristling slightly that in her past life she was apparently a man, Eriko goes along with Hitomi’s bizarre story until their relationship intensifies and it begins to annoy her. 

It’s not really clear if Hitomi actually believes what she’s saying or is making the whole thing up. It may be a way for her to try and articulate her feelings, framing the love she feels for Eriko as a cosmically fated romance that began with an apparently heterosexual union, though perhaps after all angels have no gender. On the other hand, perhaps these demons that they’re battling represent those who would stand in the way of their love. Though it’s plain that Hitomi looks at her with an obvious longing, she asks Eriko if it’s alright that she’s not a boy. When Eriko replies that it doesn’t matter, Hitomi sadly asks if anyone would do while doubting her own worthiness. Eriko laughs and kisses her again, maintaining dominance by assuring Hitomi that she will teach her as she gently removes her clothes. 

But it’s also clear that Eriko has other things going on and, in some ways, represents the demon to Hitomi’s angel. She messes around with men via the telephone club, essentially a hookup line, getting Hitomi to come with her as they go on a date with a middle-aged man they plan to extort. After she and Hitomi run away together, she sleeps with the truck driver they hitched a lift with in the next room as if deliberately torturing Hitomi who writhes in agony while being subjected to her moans. Unable to bear the torment she calls her mother and asks to be picked up. Which causes a rift between herself and Eriko in what Eriko sees as an act of betrayal. After dropping out of school, Eriko takes up with another girl and rejects Hitomi’s pleas to come back, telling her that she doesn’t want to be railroaded onto a conventional life of marriage and children that believes is all that school leads to. Hitomi may, in that sense, be more conventional. Her innocence is reflected in the fact that she’d never drunk alcohol and disliked it when Eriko made her try. She dresses in a subdued manner and is fearful of Eriko’s reckless behaviour.

Nevertheless, she too tries on Eriko’s persona by going on an awkward arcade date with a boy from the telephone club who takes her to a hotel where she sleeps with him, but evidently loathes the experience and tries to regain control of the situation by becoming violent and demanding money. Resenting Eriko’s assertion that she couldn’t be an angel because she doesn’t have a scar, Hitomi burns herself by heating a metal fork to mimic the Orion’s Belt motif of moles Eriko has on her breast. Despite accusing Hitomi of only caring about herself, it seems that Eriko too is using the fantasy as an excuse to reject emotional intimacy. The other girl she’s with accuses her of thinking of Hitomi while they make they love with which she appears to be unsatisfied and there is something in her that seems fearful of genuine connection.

When they finally reunite, the final time they make love mirrors the first with roles reversed as Hitomi gently removes Eriko’s shirt and Eriko reaches out to touch the brand on Hitomi’s breast in shyness and wonder. The Orion’s Belt motif echoes the cosmic nature of their connection, as if they had finally completed their journey home to each other. But the ominous undertones remain as Hitomi returns to her story in which she romantically sacrificed herself for Eriko by jumping into the water to quell the demons’ storm. In releasing the apparently resurrected goldfish that she flushed away in pettiness and anger, she lets herself go as, like the butterfly lovers, she and Eriko seem to be transformed into fish free to swim in the ocean. Delicately shot with the yellow hues of nostalgia, Zeze’s poetic tale of toxic, frustrated love ends on a melancholy note that suggests the lovers are bound only for a loop of eternal heartbreak in every possible reincarnation.

Warm Water Under a Red Bridge (赤い橋の下のぬるい水, Shohei Imamura, 2001)

Posted on by

According to the blue-tent philosopher, the real meaning of freedom lies in thinking for oneself and coming to your own conclusions. People today are too educated to admit their desires, he says. That’s certainly true of Sasano (Koji Yakusho), the embodiment of the contemporary salaryman and one who has now been cast adrift in the wake of economic stagnation. He later asks if an officer worker doesn’t have the right to love, and in his present state he might not because it’s made him a stranger to himself who can no longer make his own decisions or identify what he really wants out of life.

That might be the reason that the late Taro (Kazuo Kitamura) decided to send him on a wild goose chase to the Noto Peninsula where he once hid a Buddhist statue he stole from a Kyoto temple in a pot which shoved at the back of a cupboard in the house of a woman he once loved. As we later learn, Taro became a drifter after the war and ended up living with a woman now known only as “Granny” (Mitsuko Baisho) before he unfortunately killed someone and went to prison. After that, he was too ashamed to return, but it seems like Granny spent the rest of her life waiting, sitting by the little red bridge that leads to her home.

The bridge itself comes to represent a path to freedom as Sasano becomes involved with a younger woman who lives there, Saeko (Misa Shimizu) . After witnessing her seemingly wet herself while stealing cheese at the supermarket, Sasano uses an earring she lost as an excuse to enter the house and unexpectedly ends up having sex with her which causes Saeko to gush large amounts of water on orgasm. This is apparently Saeko’s affliction and to her a source of shame that’s ruined relationships and isolated her from society. Every time she has too much water inside her, or in other words, when her libido can no longer be denied, she feels the urge to exorcise it in other transgressive ways such as shoplifting. To that extent, female sexual desire is framed as something seen as taboo, but Saeko’s sexual fulfilment turns out to be good for the world around her. It’s why the trumpet flowers bloom so beautifully outside the house, and when the water flows into the river it beckons the fish in from further out to sea. Saeko doesn’t connect the two things, but it’s also, of course, why she has access to high-quality water that enables her to make delicious traditional-style sweets.

Sasano, meanwhile, begins to discover another side of himself while living in this small town. His wife often calls to nag him to transfer money, and to begin with we might assume that they’re already divorced but the truth is that they’ve been forced to live separately because of Sasano’s economic situation. Though she’s taken their son and moved back in with her parents, Sasano’s wife tells him to hurry up and get another job or else they’ll never get back to Tokyo. Nevertheless, just as he does, she may be discovering a new and happier life outside of the city. When she calls to say she wants a divorce, she tells him that their son has made a lot of new friends and he doesn’t want to move back. It seemed that what she wanted was the salaryman ideal and she resented Sasano for falling from the corporate ladder, but it turns out that there are other ways to be happy. As Taro had put it, corporate culture doesn’t want workers to think. It wants busy drones who complete tasks mindlessly to pay off their mortgages and be accepted as fully-fledged members of society.

By breaking out of the salaryman straightjacket, Sasano begins to find unexpected fulfilment in a simpler life as a fisherman. Through his reconciliation with Saeko and acceptance of the emotional dimension of their relationship rather than the purely sexual, he discovers a kind of serenity as evidenced by the rainbow that emerges above them as Saeko orgasms directly into the sea. Life is about small pleasures, the film seems to say, such as good food and sexual fulfilment, that can also improve the general environment quite literally watering the earth with human warmth.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Ichijo’s Wet Lust (一条さゆり　濡れた欲情, Tatsumi Kumashiro, 1972)

Posted on by

The opening text at the beginning of Tatsumo Kumashiro’s Ichijo’s Wet Lust (一条さゆり　濡れた欲情, Ichijo Sayuri Nureta Yokujo) informs us that though the film might be inspired by the life of Sayuri Ichijo, queen of the strippers, it is fiction. Truth be told, Sayuri Ichijo isn’t in it all that much, but her presence seems calculated given the fact that Ichijo had also been having frequent troubles with the censors over her erotic cabaret appearances. Her signature set piece involved passing around a magnifying glass so that audience members could inspect her vagina, which got her charged with obscenity. 

Shortly before the film’s release, Nikkatsu had shifted production almost entirely to its Roman Porno line of erotic dramas. In 1972, a charge of obscenity was levelled at them in relation to the film Love Hunter, after which they became embroiled in a lengthy series of legal battles which continued until 1978. Kumashiro was the screenwriter for Love Hunter, though he penned it under a pseudonym. He apparently reached out to Ichijo as a gesture of solidarity and she agreed to be in the film, though she’d previously turned down an offer from Toei, because she thought the script seemed promising and was persuaded by Kumashiro. The dig at Toei appears to be mirrored in the film as Ichijo performs a routine dressed as a samurai noblewoman dancing to the theme from Red Peony Gambler, while her other acts mix a music hall sensibility with transgressive eroticism such as candle play.

In the wake off her legal troubles, Sayuri has quit the business to open a sushi restaurant while struggling to shake off her past. An obnoxious customer seems surprised about the idea of a stripper eating ramen, only for Sayuri to remind him that they’re normal people too and eat normal food like everyone else. She may be the queen of the strippers, but Sayuri still occupies a kind underclass in the regular world in which she’s looked down upon for her erotic art even if she personally regards it empowering. Even so, the slightly younger Harumi (Hiroko Isayama) seems to want to knock her off her perch and alternates between fawning admiration and resentment.

Trying to curry favour, she tells Sayuri that she identifies with her backstory of being an orphan that they may have grown up in the same children’s home in Saitama despite her broad Osaka accent. She also tells her husband, recently released from prison after being convicted of murder, that her father was sentenced to death, though this appears to be another detail pinched from Sayuri’s biography, which may not be true in her case either. Harumi later admits that nothing she’s said about herself is actually true, which could also be a lie, as she otherwise seems intent on stealing Sayuri’s identity and with it the top spot at the club. After getting arrested and fined, she tells her friend that she’s quitting their lesbian floorshow show because, she insensitively says, the lesbian stuff’s just for talentless hacks and she’s apparently turned off by other women’s genitalia.

To try to take down Sayuri, Harumi uses sex to manipulate the men around her including her besotted husband and another man he stabbed in the leg. Scenes of Sayuri’s show are intercut with Harumi having sex on a rollercoaster while a female attendant tries very hard not to laugh and another woman looks up in confusion from the ground. Harumi seems to be making a show of her life in a different way at least to Sayuri who is courting controversy and may have sensationalised aspects of her biography to give herself a sob story but otherwise affects refinement, every inch the queen holding court when questioned by reporters about her legal troubles and retirement. Nevertheless, she too may be threatened by Harumi, point blank telling her not to make trouble at her last show and or steal her candle act when she leaves. Sayuri’s acts become more extreme as a consequence which is what gets her in trouble with the censors, while Harumi tries to perfect a weird gimmick of squirting milk out of her vagina. Even so, she goes about it with reckless abandon and a sense of fun that lends the film a breezy, down to earth sensibility that itself is, in fact, a rebuke to the censor and a defiant depiction of a young woman living a life without constraints. 

Lovers Are Wet (恋人たちは濡れた, Tatsumi Kumashiro, 1973)

Posted on by

Everyone keeps asking Katsu (Toru Ohe) if he’s Katsu, but he continues to deny it. No matter how insistent those around him are that this is his hometown, Katsu refuses to acknowledge it while claiming no other identity. It is in a way, the ultimate negation of the self and the town to him is a kind of liminal space in which he’s only ever waiting for something or else putting off the act of leaving as if prevented from moving on.

This sense of listless rootlessness may reflect that of a youth generation orphaned after the collapse of the counter-culture movement. Katsu sings bawdy folk songs in the manner of a protest singer with nothing to protest. Yoshie (Moeko Ezawa), the wife of the owner of the cinema where Katsu is working, asks him if he’s a member of the far-left movement on the run from the authorities, but Katsu says he’s not smart enough for something like that, though later admitting that he does seem to be on the run from something. 

Though she’s curious about his past, Yoshie doesn’t seem to question him about being Katsu and rather appears to want him to be an embodiment of her projected desires. She is too is trapped in this place, pinned behind the box office window with only a cat for company. Her husband rarely comes home and spends all his time with a mistress. He knows that Katsu is sleeping with his wife, but couldn’t care less. Or rather, he’s sort of grateful because it’s one less thing for him worry about. Yoshie, meanwhile, clings to him because Katsu is her only means of escape from this moribund existence. She pleads with him to stay and to love her, but Katsu doesn’t seem to be capable of love and is only sticking around for the occasional tryst. 

Catching sight of another couple having sex in the wild, he stops to peep and gets into a fist fight with the man, Mitsuo (Rebun Hori), after which they become awkward friends. Mitsuo sets him up with another girl despite Katsu’s insistence that he’s not hard up for them, but Katsu immediately tries to rape her as if asserting his primal masculinity. Ironically enough, he rides around with the banner for Sex Animal on his bike as a means of advertising and Yoko (Rie Nakagawa), the girl, later remarks that he’s reenacting the poster in his attempt to rape Sachiko (Chizuyu Azami). A sex animal seems to be what he’s become as he purses meaningless and impulsive sex that care little for the woman’s feelings, only about dominance and conquest. Sachiko later brings Katsu’s mother as if to remind him of his true identity but her rejects her, while the girl later gets the upper hand by telling both the men to get lost and no matter how much they might think they’ve won, they really haven’t.

As Katsu rapes Sachiko, Yoko and Mitsuo share ironic banter in voiceover offering a running commentary while doing nothing to help Sachiko. They too seem bored and listless, which might be why Yoko seems drawn to Katsu even if in him she perhaps sees a shadow of death which would be another way of leaving this town. He later tells her that he killed someone for money, offering the money as proof, though it’s a fairly meaningless gesture as is the money itself which doesn’t seem to have increased his possibilities. Probably, he doesn’t know what to do with it. He describes Yoshie’s warmth as like a womb, and is apparently in this town waiting either for death or to be reborn, though Yoshie’s own failed suicide attempt seems to suggest there is no real escape from this purgatorial existence. When he tells her he wants to go somewhere else, Yoshie tells him that it’s the same everywhere anyway, so leaving will make no difference and there is nowhere he can go. 

The increasingly prosperous Japan of the mid-1970s in which the student movement has died seems to have no place for him. Kumashiro kicks back against this sense of ennui partly through his ironic use of censorship which cannot help but suggest what it hides. The large black bars and scratched out pools of white hint at an attempt to erase and oppress sexuality, which is the means by which Katsu and fails to find freedom, just as they oppress freedom of expression. Katsu meanwhile continues to block things out, rejecting his identity and behaving like a character from a film more hollow archetype than man just as Yoko seems to be an embodiment of his projected desires. She too may have only one destination available to her in this inescapable cycle of unfulfilled longing and crushing ennui.