Udine Dispatch. 6.

New Japanese cinema was given full attention in a series of seminars at the Udine Far East Film Festival with discussions on various genres. One of the spotlights at the festival is pinku eiga, soft-core Japanese porn. The "genre" accounted for 65 percent of Japanese film production in the 70s. Audiences decreased in the 80s and 90s and the films have now transitioned into the DVD market.

The screening of Meike Mitsuru's The Glamorous Life of Sachiko Hanai (2005) was sold out. Meike says he's usually invited to art museums and festivals to show his films, usually made in about three to five days, with two weeks of post-production. And typically the amateur actors are not paid. Probably the main reason the film attracted a large audience is because it pokes fun at George W Bush, who becomes prey to the forces of Eros and Thanatos. Of course, it's not original, portraying warmongers as sexually frustrated: Kubrick's Dr Strangelove brings that home. Sachiko (Kuroda Emi) cites chaos theory and quotes Noam Chomsky and Susan Sontag, but one of the common criticisms of the film is that she doesn't seem to know what she's talking about. It doesn't seem to matter, because she has been shot in the head, with a gaping bullet wound to boot, and is still functioning. Sachicko seems to stumble over men in between reciting theory in the midst of chaos with sex scenes every ten minutes. She tells the men she meets she is "practicalist" rather than a "situationalist" - yet another empty reference to intellectual discourse. Meike says it comes from a Woody Allen line about "call girls," not the philosophy of Guy Debord.

The Japanese 19th century mystery writer Edogawa Rampo inspires another provocative genre presented at the festival: Rampo Noir, or "ero-guro," grotesque eroticism. Rampo fashioned his name after Edgar Allan Poe. Four directors - Takeuchi Suguru, Jissoji Akio, Sato Hisayasu, Kaneko Atsushi offer their version of Rampo's work, all casting Tadanobu Asano.

The first, Mars Canal (Kasei no Unga), by Takeuchi, is the shortest and most stunning - a crater, a naked man and the choreography of two passionate lovers. In The Hell Of Mirrors (Kagami Jigoku), Jissoji Akio tells a stylized tale of deadly mirrors that burn the brain matter of geishas at a Japanese Tea House. Detective Akeschi arrives to investigate. Akechi also appears in Jissoji's Murder on D Street (1997), a homoerotic and sado-masochistic tale of an artist commissioned to make forgeries of illustrations of tortured women. The cool style of the film is exceptional if you forget the contorted and bound images of women. But that's what makes it Rampo Noir.

Sato's The Caterpillar (Imomushi) concerns a war victim whose arms and legs have been severed and who commands his wife to further torture him for sexual pleasure. Sato provides the classic definition of aestheticized sexual violence while shedding little light on the subject. Two people clash, their passion (loosely interpreted) compels them to extremes of pain and the result is "beauty." The director with strong roots in pink told me that "Japan is our mother - we are taken such good care of in swaddling cotton that we need to crush this dependency." The explanation seems to fit Sato's work well.

With its decomposing bodies, Crawling Bugs (Mushi), by Kaneko Atsushi, is probably the most reminiscent of Poe. Tadanobu Asano plays an obsessive compulsive with skin allergies who wants to keep a stage actress all to himself after strangling her. Her body becomes an artwork situated in a kitsch aura of white lights and a gaudy flower arrangement taken from a portrait off the wall of his dermatologist. The fourth act certainly qualifies as horror when we see the real setting of this creation.

Photos of Meike Mitsuru and Sato Hisayasu © Moira Sullivan.

Posted by dwhudson at April 29, 2006 2:21 PM