Danchizuma: Hirusagari no jôji (2010) Reviews

• Pretty worthy latter-day "pink" film

  lazarillo2014-09-09

  A lonely, neglected housewife has an affair with a door-to-door salesman. This is the most hackneyed porno plot imaginable, but this is actually a surprisingly interesting latter-day Japanese "pink" movie. First off, it took me until halfway through the movie, when a character pulls out a cell phone, before I realized that this was not one of those 1970's-era Nikkatsu "pink" movies that many American DVD companies have recently unearthed, but an actual 2010 movie. I would hope female fashions in provincial Japan--let alone gender relations--have progressed a little since the 1970s, but I suspect that this is actually meant to be somewhat of an homage to the great "pink" films of yore. The film also has relatively high production values and is not ALL sex, which is a major thing that separates the more interesting "pink" films from the more graphic--and boring--Japanese "AV" videos of today. It's surprisingly long on plot and character development: the wife is grieving the recent loss of her newborn baby, while the salesman has been abandoned by his unfaithful wife and left with a resentful--and perhaps dangerously disturbed--pre-adolescent son, who he struggles to provide for. The sex scenes are quite perverse--maybe not very erotic, but certainly perverse. The couple make, um, interesting use of a baby rattle and diapers the women was given at the baby shower of her now-deceased infant. There's also a truly weird scene where the housewife is tricked out of her panties by a pair of uniformed schoolgirls (because apparently that's what those mischievous little Japanese "roritas" do all day is steal other young women's panties). But even though this movie often diverges into some very weird--if not totally uninteresting--male fantasy, it also has a genuine sense of melancholy and realism to it. The acting is pretty good and the lead actress looks like a real woman as opposed to a tattooed, silicone-laden American porn skank or a heavily pixillated Japanese "AV" bimbo who couldn't act her way out of a crisp paper sack. Showing real women having sex can actually be strangely erotic. . . This is by no means a great movie, but if you like the "pink" genre in general, it's certainly a worthy one.

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