Anxious Virgin: One More Time, I Love You (Doki Doki ヴァージン　もういちど I LOVE YOU, Shun Nakahara, 1990)

Posted on by

A cocky young man gets hit by a truck on his way to lose his virginity, but manages to get a heavenly civil servant to give him a second chance in Shun Nakahara’s surprisingly nuanced teen sex comedy, Anxious Virgin: One More Time I Love You (Doki Doki ヴァージン　もういちど I LOVE YOU, Doki Doki Virgin Mo Ichido I Love You). The second in Nikkatsu’s entry in the straight-to-video market, the title might hark back to their Roman Porno days and conjure an image of something salacious and exploitative, yet what the hero Hideki (Yasufumi Hayashi) eventually comes to realise is that there’s no rush when it comes to something like physical intimacy and that it’s important to consider the other person’s feelings along with your own emotional readiness. 

He learns this mainly because he’s abruptly forced into a female body, that of Mari who is the best friend of the innocent Sachiko (Shinobu Nakayama). Much to Hideki’s annoyance, Sachiko has a crush on his old school rival, Kakinuma. Good-looking and successful, Kakinuma is a bit of a cad but also envied by the other boys because he lives in a private annex and has a reputation for bringing girls back there to have sex. Neither Hideki nor any of his friends think much about the girls as people with thoughts and emotions of their own, but fixate solely on the action of sexual intercourse. One of the boys has a weird sexual fantasy about his sister whom he saw naked in the shower. While looking at her, her physical form became divorced from her personhood so that he forgot the taboo of incest and appreciated only the presence of a naked woman in close proximity.

The boys do something similar on coming across a girl from another school who is about to engage in outdoor sexual activity with a boy they know. After he blindfolds her as an ironic way of mitigating her embarrassment, the boys cart him off and begin digitally penetrating the girl themselves without any real thought for her personhood let alone her consent. They hear the boy repeating the phrase “I love you” and come to see it almost as a spell that makes a girl let someone have sex with her. Masao, the most lovelorn, tries this again later in trying to get Hideki in Mari’s body to kiss him, though Hideki is obviously not at all interested. 

By this point, Hideki is interested in Sachiko on an emotional as well as purely sexual level but is hampered by his female body. “Mari” appears to the audience as Hideki throughout, amusingly dressed in old-fashioned prison clothes, though the film only sort of flirts with the idea of same-sex desire. In reality, the conflict that caused Mari to lose her consciousness was that she too was in love with Kakinuma, though the problem now is that Hideki can’t support Sachiko in her romance not only because he has a rivalry with Kakinuma and knows him to be a poor romantic prospect, but because he desires her himself. When he eventually kisses Sachiko, she doesn’t quite know what to make of it. She evidently gives it some thought, but decides two girls dating each other doesn’t seem quite right to her and sets “Mari” up with a date with Masao, which is still accidentally a gay date that Hideki isn’t interested in. 

Thus the film defaults to heteronormativity, if in a sensitive and empathetic fashion. Nevertheless, through his experiences in a female body Hideki begins to come to a greater appreciation of what it’s like for girls. Despite having spent the entire film trying to lose his virginity, he tells Mari’s younger sister Riko that she won’t die if she doesn’t have sex and that he disapproves of her whirlwind romance. He understands both that Sachiko is naive and that Kakinuma is no hero but a destructive predator who just wants to have sex whether the girl wants to or not. Giving up his chance to lose his virginity and risking being dragged to hell, Hideki decides to save Sachiko from being pressured into sex and then engages with her in a conversation about the importance of consent and emotional readiness in which they both agree that “rules and timing” are important when it comes to physical intimacy. What began as a rather raucous teen sex comedy has morphed into a sweet and sensitive coming-of-age drama in which rather than obsessing over the physical act, the hero falls in love and is content to end his life having given voice to his feelings.

Screened as part of the International Film Festival Rotterdam’s Focus on V-Cinema.

Passport to Darkness (暗黒の旅券, Seijun Suzuki, 1959)

Posted on by

Another of Seijun Suzuki’s early Nikkatsu noirs, Passport to Darkness (暗黒の旅券, Ankoku no Ryoken) starts out like The Lady Vanishes and then turns into the 39 Steps while drawing influence from hardboiled Hollywood movies such as The Big Sleep. It is, however, very much about the confusing landscape of late 1950s Japan in which nothing is quite as it seems and shady forces are constantly operating in the background out of view. “Darkness can descend on our lives just like that, can’t it?” the hero remarks, “there’s only so much an individual can do,” he sighs, “who’s going to protect us?”

Probably not the policeman, who replies that that’s just how Japan is now. Though, in general, the police are doing something even if there are hints they’re also mixed up in this swirling darkness. They don’t really hang on to jazz trumpeter Ibuki (Ryoji Hayama) as a suspect for very long, though they do keep him under a watchful eye just in case. Ibuki marries the singer from his nightclub band and is about to depart on his honeymoon, an all expenses paid gift from his bosses, when he gets off the train to look for a friend who’s running late, Moriwaki. When he gets back on the train, his new wife, Hiromi, is nowhere to be found.

Rather than thinking she may ironically have got off the train to look for him and not made it back on, Ibuki jumps to the conclusion that she’s got cold feet and jilted him before their honeymoon. Though he gets off at the next station, he’s too embarrassed to call any of his friends fearing they’ll make fun of him for being a guy whose wife left right after the wedding. It’s this sense of insecurity that makes him a little less sympathetic, thinking mostly about himself rather than seriously considering something may have happened to Hiromi or that she’s just on the next train. That’s probably why he doesn’t do anything sensible, like going back to their apartment to see if she’s there, and only makes cryptic phone calls before asking a friend to meet him in a bar and explaining the situation. He spends the evening on an endless pub crawl supposedly looking for her while drowning his sorrows. When does eventually get home, he discovers Hiromi dead in their flat having been strangled with a tie. Obviously, this makes him the prime suspect, though the police are unusually open to the idea someone else was involved.

Ibuki turns private detective trying to work out what happened to Hiromi and who might have wanted to hurt her. The police tell him there was heroin in her handbag and they therefore suspect the crime has something to do with drugs, but that doesn’t add up with the Hiromi that Ibuki knew. Either they’re wrong, or Hiromi was somehow hiding a massive drug problem from him and maybe he didn’t know her at all. This sense of uncertainty is echoed in Suzuki’s dreamlike aesethetic which already leans towards the surreal. When the club MC announces Ibuki’s marriage onstage, he dissolves to be replaced by Moriwaki who hands the pair their honeymoon tickets suggesting that sudden appearances, disappearances, and missing time are common in this world. Later Ibuki listens to a secret conversation through a wall of jagged glass echoing the confusing nature of the story he’s beginning to trace.

That story itself largely revolves around drugs and displacement. Hiromi had been looking for her missing brother with the police suggesting he’d probably become a yakuza and might not be worth looking for. Others are motivated solely by a determination to liberate their loved ones from a drug addiction that has been forced on them as a means of control by an organisation that’s dealing drugs from bar called Tsubo on which Ibuki stumbled during his drunken pub crawl. One of the ringleaders, Ishimaru, is said to be from a zaibatsu family, which the heir to a large conglomerate and a member of the economic elite. He mentions a past in the navy and his conversation steers toward the nationalist, lending a nasty flavour to his already shady activities.

Eventually the trail leads back to a Frenchman named Franc and a “gay boy”, to use the parlance of the time, named Kenny who is also trapped due to being a drug user. It’s not particularly unusual to see places like these, essentially host bars where men pay to drink with effeminate male hosts, in films of the time, but Passport to Darkness is particularly sympathetic towards the community. It’s clear that the evil is drugs and that Kenny is an innocent who’s been swept into intrigue. Gay bars and gay people are just normal parts of life, not evidence of a seedy underbelly or the moral turpitude of the post-war society. What is rather surprising is that the film features a kiss between two men, which is pretty progressive for 1959.

Nevertheless, as Ibuki says, there’s not much the individual can do defend against the forces of darkness and even some of his closest friends turned out to be no good, while those he doubted were actually on his side. He keeps getting mysterious letters warning him off all signed “K” which is inconvenient, because most of the people he knows have a claim to the initial, and really it could be anyone. There doesn’t seem to be a clear answer to the question of who is going to take responsibility, but Ibuki simply goes back to his life, deciding music is the best way to honour Hiromi’s memory by playing American jazz in a bar that’s mainly frequented by an international clientele hinting at the nation’s new global ambitions.

Scare Out (惊蛰无声, Zhang Yimou, 2026)

Posted on by

When a suspected spy gets away with some top secret information, the security services begin to suspect they may have a mole on their hands in Zhang Yimou’s slick espionage thriller, Scare Out (惊蛰无声, Jīngzhé Wúshēng). Possibly inspired by a real-life case in which information regarding a new fighter jet was leaked, the film is supervised by the security services themselves and in part a defence of China’s all powerful surveillance network and technological supremacy that allows them to neutralise threats to national security in record time.

Nevertheless, like some of Zhang’s recent work, it’s surprising that he was able to get away with the depiction of a rogue intelligence officer and potentially not quite on level actions from the security services even if they’re eventually vindicated by a final twist. When we’re first introduced to Huang (Zhu Yilong), he’s hot on the trail of foreign spy Nathan whom they assume to be receiving confidential information regarding a new stealth system for fighter jets leaked by a scientist who is desperate to leave the country (Lei Jiayin). Huang is shot in the back by an arrow, while his colleague takes one to the neck and is killed. Though they manage to arrest Nathan, he’s almost killed when the box he’s carrying spontaneously combusts burning the contents.

It’s at this point that things start to go wrong for Huang as his former colleague Zhao Hong (Song Jia) returns to lead the team and he’s one of three suspects for a possible mole alongside his second in command Yan Di (Jackson Yee), and their drone operator Chan Yi who killed the sniper either accidentally or on purpose by ramming him so that he fell from the upper levels while trying to escape. Until now, Huang had been depicted as an upright and dedicated officer who absolutely could not be the mole, but we soon discover that he in fact is, or at least that he was in the process of being turned by foreign asset Bai Fan (Yang Mi). With his marriage falling apart, he fell right into her honey trap and is now being blackmailed but theoretically still has the opportunity to turn this around if only he can hold out and find a way to do the right thing.

Then again, the film deliberately wrong-foots us by occasionally suggesting that maybe Huang isn’t the mole after all or that there may be more than one or something larger going on all together. It’s not really revealed why Bai Fan has betrayed her country to work for a foreign intelligence agency led by a Westerner living in China and with incredibly good Mandarin. The foreign agency evidently thinks this region’s important enough to be worth creating a long-term network of sleeper agents, while the way the security services discuss the stolen stealth data makes it sound as if they’re already in a war and very much don’t want “the enemy” to get hold of this information. 

The real action, however, is the interplay between accused Huang and Yan Di whose relationship takes on intensely homoerotic quality. Just as Huang is torn between his duty as an intelligence officer and the predicament he finds himself in, Yan Di is torn by the desire to protect his friend while simultaneously avoiding implicating himself. They must either betray each other, themselves, China, or all three, which isn’t an ideal set of choices. Meanwhile, the spy craft on show has a very traditional quality with smartphones secured in rubbish bins in public lavatories, dead drops, and mysterious potions that can destroy evidence, all of which suggests that there are ways in which this vast surveillance network is in fact fallible and can’t protect against every eventuality even if it’s just someone leaving a bathroom in a different outfit than they were wearing when they went in.

Though Zhang does his best to lend the city a near future gloss as a techno paradise in which there are no secrets, he opts for an unusual fast editing style which makes the narrative much more difficult to follow while encouraging an atmosphere of intense paranoia where everything moves at breakneck speed and nothing is ever certain. Like his recent films Under the Light and Article 20, however, it’s a curiously anonymous affair and bears few of the hallmarks of Zhang’s filmmaking as a fifth generation director opting instead for a fairly generic, mainstream blockbuster aesthetic. Nevertheless, in its twists and turns along with the interplay between the two leads the film nods back towards the intrigue of Infernal Affairs and a history of Heroic Bloodshed less commonly found in Mainland crime dramas.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Kyu-chan, Draw Your Sword (九ちゃん刀を抜いて, Masahiro Makino, 1963)

Posted on by

Kyu Sakamoto was a hugely popular singing star in the 1960s best known internationally for the smash hit Ue wo Muite Aruko (Sukiyaki) which, somewhat incongruously, features in this jidaigeki comedy, Kyu-chan Draw Your Sword (九ちゃん刀を抜いて, Kyu-chan Katana wo Nuite), directed by one of the masters of the samurai movie, Masahiro Makino. Adapted from the novel by Ippei Okamoto, the film is essentially a vehicle for Sakamoto as indicated by the inclusion of his name in the title even though he plays a character called “Sangoro”.

The joke is that Sangoro is incredibly lazy and can hardly lift his head off the pillow while his ageing parents are struggling to feed themselves. If they don’t find a way to get him working soon, they’ll all starve to death but Sangoro seems incapable of understanding. The parents try to think up various jobs he could do without having to exert himself and eventually come up with Kyokaku, or “town knight”, a man about town of the Edo era somewhere between street tough and vigilante. In fact he even ends up meeting some legendary characters such as Banzuiin Chobe (Eitaro Shindo) who became a kind of Robin Hood figure in later literature standing up for the common man against the abuses of the samurai class. 

When he goes off to the city to become a Kyokaku because he figures starving to death would be too much effort, Sangoro’s father cautions him not to be too lazy to draw his sword even though it’s rusty and unlikely to do much damage. Sengoro does, however, take his ambition seriously and is keen to make a name for himself in Edo which he first does by becoming the blood brother of Gonbei (Chiyonosuke Azuma), one of Banzuiin’s men. Though his clumsy attempts to fight him don’t bode well for Sangoro’s career, Gonbei takes him on precisely because he’s fun to have around even if he is a bit useless and sometimes you need guys like that too. Introducing him to area’s top courtesan Takamado (Yoko Minamida), they hope to set the cat among the pigeons with a local gang that’s been harassing them led by the irritating Mizuno (Fumitake Omura) and Shirogoro (Koshiro Harada).

Though the film may be, in a way, a sort of satire poking fun at aimless post-war youth that lacks ambition in comparison to their parents’ generation who bore the brunt of wartime privation. Naive and childish, Sangoro is a well-meaning bumbler, but Takamado unexpectedly likes him precisely for these qualities. She hates men like Mizuno who are obsessed with proving their masculinity and finds it refreshing that Sangoro is not afraid to show his weakness. Just like Gonbei, she appreciates him not for his command of the sword or imposing air of authority, but simply because he’s an uncomplicated good person and fun to be around.

Mizuno and Shigoro are, by contrast, cruel and abusive Tokugawa vassals, who, it’s implied, have a habit of murdering sex workers during their New Year endurance tests. Sangoro is keen to save a young woman, Omitsu (Yumiko Kokonoe), after her father did him a favour and explained he needed 25 ryo to buy back her contract after she agreed to sacrifice herself to get the money for her mother’s medical treatment. Which is to say, she’s the opposite of Sangoro. It turns out that Takamado has a sad story of her own staged by Makino using kabuki-esque sets and effects to dramatise her flashback as she explains her samurai father took his own life after a prisoner he was watching disappeared. Though in another film this might lead to a violent confrontation challenging the evil samurai, in this version a bizarre misundersanding is revealed to have caused the death of Takamado’s father leading to another act of levelling as the supposed villain agrees to give them his secret recipe for pickles with an exclusive license to manufacture it for three years before it’s essentially made open source for the good of the people. Thus Sangoro essentially becomes a shopkeeper and releases both Omitsu and Takamado from their position as indentured sex workers, restoring both their birthright and their freedom basically by being nice and the right kind of righteous while Mizuno and Shigoro just end up embarrassed when all their posturing and obsession with their samurai status appears to mean little in a world in which the merchant has indeed become king.

Night King (夜王, Jack Ng Wai-Lun, 2026)

Posted on by

Times are changing in the Hong Kong of Jack Ng Wai-Lun’s Lunar New Year comedy, Night King (夜王). Reuniting the team behind the megahit A Guilty Conscience, Ng paints the tiny enclave of old-fashioned hostess bars at its centre as the last bastion of a disappearing culture where a good-hearted manager holds out against the encroaching forces of capitalism in the form of his ex-wife, Madam V (Sammi Cheng), who is determined to buy the club and rule all of East Tsim Sha Tsui. 

Back in the economic boom of the 80s and 90s, Foon (Dayo Wong) ruled the roost as the famed “Night King” of the entertainment district, but these days clubs are closing reft, left, and centre, while his EJ is one of the only holdouts left alongside Madam V’s Muses. Madam V has poached several of Foon’s best girls which is why his bar is understaffed, but there’s no real denying that the place is on its way out because customer behaviour has changed. Madam V bristles when her boss’ nerdy son Prince Fung (Siuyea Lo) suggests young people don’t go to places like these any more and they’re better off turning it into a modern nightclub instead, but he does have a point. Most of the clientele are elderly men who might be rich but won’t be very coming for very much longer while there’s no one really there to take their place. The younger men who do come, like Fung, on occasion, are there because, as Foon says, hostess bars are naturally places where information circulates freely.

To that extent, Madam V represents an incursion of modern capitalism as she ruthlessly takes her red pen to the books and insists on getting rid of unpopular girls. Rather than the current system, she suggests switching to a pageant style in which the girls are brought in en masse with the customer taking his pick, which somehow seems even more sexist and sleazy than before. Madam V’s ambition seems to have been one reason for the marriage’s failure and it’s clear that she resents Foon for being a soft touch. As she says, he lends money to every girl that asks him and is actually quite supportive of them in a way that makes this business seem less exploitative than it might otherwise be. In any case, he’s determined to hang on to his long timers even if some of them have aged out of active hostessing while Madam V wants to bring in her army of soulless and identical ringers.

So the question is really, is it better to go down with the ship clinging to the past or join the capitalist revolution alongside men like Fung who no longer value Hong Kong and do most of their business abroad. Of course, there might be another way if Madam V and Foon can find their way back to working together, but the first problem is the petty princeling with a sexist chip on his shoulder because he can’t accept it that his sister is a better businesswoman and the likely heir to his father’s empire. His family seem to have written him off already, and sadly they may have been right. Giving himself a glam up, Fung shows up at the club like a playboy throwing his money around, but has secretly teamed up the widow of Foon’s late Triad godfather to screw over Madam V for the purposes revenge, while Mrs Wong simply wants rid of the club because she couldn’t stand her husband’s involvement in the seedier side of his business as a violent gangster. 

As in so many recent Hong Kong films, the idea seems to be that it’s better to let go of the past and take with you only what you can carry. Foon and Madam V eventually open a new club that’s fully their own rather than inherited or run on behalf of a backer. In essence, it’s still a hostess bar, but in a different part of town and more modern in sensibility, skewing young professional rather than elderly billionaire. Foon too is dressing in a more contemporary fashion, abandoning his colourful open-neck shirts with visible medallion and jeans for a smart suit jacket and turtle neck. Nevertheless, Ng seems to be looking back rather than forwards in his directorial style including typical elements of 80s and 90s cinema such as slow motion, freeze frames, and fade to black transitions perhaps to echo the ways in which Foon is stuck in the past. The eventual message though is one of solidarity and creating your own space outside of whatever external forces may be constraining it.

Trailer (Traditional Chinese / English subtitles)

All You Need Is Kill (Kenichiro Akimoto, 2025)

Posted on by

Ever get the feeling that every day is the same and nothing you do makes any difference? Rita’s (Ai Mikami) been feeling like that most of her life. Just going through the motions waiting for something to happen that would give her an excuse to change. And now she has her opportunity, because the world’s been invaded by a plant-like structure and no one yet knows quite why. All she and a team of other youngish people can do is poke around at the roots, but nothing really changes and no progress is made, which might be one reason Rita’s not really bothering. She’s sullen with her teammates and barely knows how to use her exosuit to the extent that even walking around in it is physically difficult. 

When Darol suddenly turns evil and sends out plant-like soldiers to massacre humanity, Rita is powerless but unexpectedly wakes up the next morning to discover the day is repeating. Every day, she must go fight Darol again, get killed, and then wake up to do the same thing. Perhaps it’s not so different from the way things were before in which each day was filled only with labour to the extent that one was indistinguishable from another, but it’s also a maddening loop from which Rita fears she cannot escape. Though taking liberties with its source material, Kenichiro Akimoto’s anime adaptation of Hiroshi Sakurazaka’s light novel is another in a series of films expressing a sense of emptiness felt among the younger generation hamstrung by a stagnant economy and conservative society where self-fulfilment and satisfaction feel at odds with a commonly held notion of success. Rika goes to battle every day, but achieves nothing before everything resets and she has to start again.

Just as she’s beginning to lose hope, she discovers another looper who has been secretly watching her exploits and supporting from the sidelines yet essentially hiding. Like her carrying childhood trauma and a sense of powerless inferiority, tech whiz Keiji (Natsuki Hanae) spent most of his first few loops trying to run away, which is understandable, only to be ironically inspired by Rita’s determination. She figures out not only that she needs a plan rather than just battling away on instinct alone, but also that she needs help. Her attempts to warn the others of Darol’s impending transformation fail, but looping with Keiji shows her the value of solidarity and the relief of sharing her burdens with someone else. As she says, she’d been selfish and self-involved, unable to see the meaning in anything until she finally realised that there was no point waiting around for the world to change. If she changed herself, the world would change around her if only that she would start to look at it differently.

These are the kinds of rebirth the pair are headed towards through their infinite karmic cycle of trying to figure out how to stop Darol and save the world. Nevertheless, the fact that Keiji is manipulating Rita’s suit and is able to programme his own to act in certain ways undercuts the notion of Rita being the arbiter of her own destiny, given that certain things are already being decided for her by an outside force other than the cosmic accident of the loop by which they are both connected. Then there’s also the implication that each of them are chosen ones that Darol particularly wants to absorb because they’re already strong, they just didn’t know it. But what really matters is that the pair begin to believe in the possibility of tomorrow enough to stop actively holding it back. Rita used to wish tomorrow would never come, and then it did stop coming, and that wasn’t any better. In fact, it was worse. At least now they each have the desire to proceed in the direction of tomorrow, together. Akimoto’s somewhat retro-inspired designs add to the sense of stopped time while the kinetic action sequences lean in to the feeling that Rita’s life is an inescapable slog against overwhelming odds and enemies that constantly respawn validating the nihilistic futility in which she is mired until finally realising that only she, with Keiji’s help, can break herself out of this cycle and finally find the way to a new tomorrow.

All You Need Is Kill is in UK cinemas from 27th February courtesy of Anime Limited.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Angel Guts: Red Vertigo (天使のはらわた 赤い眩暈, Takashi Ishii, 1988)

Posted on by

Throughout the Angel Guts series, a woman named Nami and a man called Muraki somehow come together and explore the complex interplay between men and women. In his first directorial effort adapting his own source material Takashi Ishii takes the series in a dreamlike and melancholic direction, shaving off some of its harsh edges but also fully indulging in a nourish sense of fatalistic nihilism. They may not know it, but these are of course two people dancing on the edge of an abyss with no place to go back to.

In fact, the very nature of sleeping and waking has become blurred for exhausted nurse Nami (Mayako Katsuragi) despite the heart monitors bleeping all around her. She thinks of her boyfriend, Kenji (Hirofumi Kobayashi), who takes erotic photographs he claims are all of her, but doesn’t seem altogether sincere under the red lights of his darkroom as he repeatedly asks Nami to pose for him. Her patients, meanwhile, often call her for reasons that aren’t strictly medical. Trying to stay awake on her rounds, she’s violently accosted by two men only for her supervisor to insist that the room is currently vacant. Perhaps Nami dreamed it, though the experience is traumatic enough for her to go home early and inadvertently catch Kenji with one of his models in their apartment. He tells the model that he’s not interested in marriage, though she asks about his “wife”, adding to Nami’s pain and confusion on hearing him describe their relationship so casually.

Meanwhile, Muraki is dreaming more literally. He imagines himself fondling a woman who runs a bar before being coaxed towards an ominous-looking bath that presages his visit to the love hotel with Nami. We hear that his wife has left him, and that he’s being hounded by debt collectors while on the run after embezzling a large amount of money from his company believing it was “easy” and that no one would really notice or care. This is, after all, an age of excess that would only later become known as the Bubble era, though the bubble has certainly burst for Muraki. Ironically enough, he’ll meet a sticky end after getting on the wrong side of a man driving a Mercedes (Akira Emoto) as if he were literally gunned down by a rampant status-driven consumerism. The man looks and behaves like a yakuza, but is unusually reckless even if hotheaded in believing he’s been treated with an insufficient amount of respect for a man with a fancy ride.

Nami too is hit by a car, literally colliding with Muraki who first thinks he’s killed her and somehow made his situation even worse. On realising she’s still alive, though having measured her pulse with his thumb which proves nothing other than his own heart is still beating, he decides to assault her instead later explaining that he just wanted warmth which only makes him seem even more pathetic. Nami, however, fights back wielding a plank like a phallic object and taking back control only for Muraki to keep her prisoner in an abandoned building. There is, however, something that develops between the pair with the rain beating down and isolating them from the outside world. Stuck in this liminal place, they each accept that they have no place to go back to and therefore have only each other. 

But there is really no salvation in this harsh world and nowhere to go which is why Muraki is stopped in his tracks and Nami condemned to a perpetual waiting even if she’s found a kind of freedom dancing alone in her limbo state and under the colourful neon lights of the abandoned warehouse. Asked what he most feared in this world, a character in David Lynch’s Twin Peaks replied “the possibility that love is not enough,” an idea which seems to echo through Ishii’s melancholy urban landscapes, all garish neon offering the semblance of warmth but always drenched in rain. Even interior spaces seem misty and uncertain, leading us into a kind of dream space otherwise indistinguishable from waking life. Muraki and Nami are, however, evidently on different paths and unlikely to find their way back to each other even if either of them manage to break free of their respective dead ends.

Angel Guts: Red Vertigo is available as part of The Angel Guts Collection released on blu-ray 23rd February courtesy of Third Window Films.

Angel Guts: Red Porno (天使のはらわた 赤い淫画, Toshiharu Ikeda, 1981)

Posted on by

“Lots of perverts around these days”, Nami (Jun Izumi) sighs to herself on becoming convinced that someone’s stalking her. She isn’t wrong, but her increasing paranoia bears out the sense of threat in the contemporary city. Perhaps something has happened to her before, or maybe it’s because she’s a young woman living alone who has been receiving dirty calls from anonymous heavy breather, but she can’t escape the sense of being watched even when she’s at home on her own.

Nami isn’t a well-known person, but it’s not beyond the realms of possibility that some strange man has followed her home from the department store where she works after taking a liking to her. She sees herself clearly as not that kind of woman, and ostensibly leads a very proper life with a decent job and her own apartment. The fact that she masturbates under her kotatsu might be both an expression of her loneliness and an attempt to own her sexuality, but also hints at its illicitness in the fact that it is hidden and out of view. When her friend asks her to fill in at her part-time gig, Nami agrees out of politeness but far from the simple modelling job she was expecting, she’s forced into a shoot for a bondage magazine and becomes an unexpected pinup star.

The reason she’s so popular may indeed be because of the real shock and confusion obvious in her almost comical expression. Though the team from the magazine want her to come back promising a sizeable paycheque, Nami refuses and is unable to accept the image of herself as a pornographic model. When a man, Muraki (Masahiko Abe), chases her into a ladies’ bathroom at the train station, she keeps telling him that she’s not that sort of woman, but there’s uncertainty in her voice and what she most seems to want is vindication. Meanwhile, she’s basically harassed into an affair with her married floor manager who gets her drunk and takes her to a hotel room explaining that she was regarded as the “hardest girl to get” among the department store staff. He becomes increasingly forceful as Nami resists before finally giving in and thereafter continuing an affair with him. 

Even before she became an accidental magazine star, Nami was indeed the focus of unwanted attention and felt herself threatened by simply by existing in a male society. Muraki peeps on the teenage girl who lives in the posh house next to his rundown apartment building as she, ironically, masturbates by shoving an egg into her vagina and cracking it open with a set of pencils. Later it seems as if the girl knew Muraki was watching her, but evidently continued to do it anyway. In any case, Muraki’s peeping is also a kind of class transgression as is his fantasy of raping his landlady after she enters his apartment without permission in the belief that he’s been stealing women’s underwear. Unable to get a job, his existence is fairly dismal and he’s viewed with suspicion by his neighbours due to his slovenly appearance and uncouth manner. He too becomes fixated on Nami’s photo, fantasising about her as a possible source of salvation based only on her image in the magazine.

When he eventually encounters Nami, he too like her boss first seems as if he means to force himself on her, but then pulls back, explains that his feelings are genuine, and he’d rather meet her in a more normal way in a public place to go on a conventional date, making clear that he’s interested in Nami, not just the image of her from the magazine onto which he’s projected his own fantasies. But conversely, as much as it might inspire a sense of hope in the readers, the photo is also a liability and when her floor manager discovers it, he attempts to blackmail her into shifting the dynamics of their relationship so that he’d no longer have to pay for hotel rooms or expend any extra funds on Nami. Despite the fact her friend has been a nude model for ages, Nami is dismissed from the department store. The boss describes her as “just a slut”, though lamenting it’s a shame seeing as she was so pretty as he instructs her floor manager to fire her, bearing out the double standard that men are free to view these images but scorn the women who are in them.

Nevertheless, the encounter with Muraki and being let go from the department store provoke a kind of liberation in which Nami flips the kotatsu over and masturbates with the chair leg bathed in the red glow of the heater. She has perhaps fully embraced her sexuality, indulging in rope play and no longer hidden beneath the curtain of the blanket but orgiastically pleasuring herself out in the open. Muraki, meanwhile, pays another sort of price in being the prime suspect in a rape and murder just because the neighbours think he’s a bit weird and assume it must be him. He continues to cling to the idea of Nami as a kind of salvation, while she too seems drawn to him and is about to throw away the magazine and say goodbye to this sorry episode in her life until a potential happy ending is abruptly cut short. Filled with urban melancholy, the film paints both Muraki and Nami as prisoners of their society, unable to find self-acceptance or security save in the frustrated bond they unexpectedly discover in their shared desire for escape.

Angel Guts: Red Porno is available as part of The Angel Guts Collection released on blu-ray 23rd February courtesy of Third Window Films.

Angel Guts: Nami (天使のはらわた　名美, Noboru Tanaka, 1979)

Posted on by

Aspiring journalist Nami Tsuchiya (Eri Kanuma) works for a magazine called “The Woman,” but it soon becomes clear she’s their only female reporter and one of a handful of women in an office otherwise staffed by men. Her editor has her writing a series titled “Rape and its Consequences” in which she attempts to interview women who’ve experienced sexual assault in an attempt to root out the effect it’s had on their lives. At times Nami seems a little conflicted, puffing away on a cigarette with a pensive look on her face, but there’s no denying that she’s sold out other women for a chance to make it in a man’s world by exploiting a suffering she does not herself share.

Muraki (Takeo Chii), formerly a top magazine editor, reminds her that not everyone who reads her magazine is a woman, but there is something perverse about the idea of her article which is otherwise conceived from a perspective that seems very male. The female readership of this magazine would not need to be educated about the prevalence of rape nor its consequences. Nami’s article doesn’t seem to want to find success stories, but to revel in misery. She accosts one of the women she’s hoping to interview and tries to badger her into talking on the record. Yoshiko appears fed up and tells her that recounting what happened would be like being raped all over again, but still Nami doesn’t relent. She tries to guilt her into speaking by suggesting that her testimony would stop other women being assaulted, which is backwards logic seeing as it isn’t the women who are responsible and even if she were advancing a victim blaming narrative that it’s on women to protect themselves, Yoshiko had not done anything that could be seen to be “wrong” nor is there any way she could have prevented what happened to her.

Through her articles, Nami has become complicit in this culture and is effectively an agent of rape herself in her desire to tear into the lives these women have tried to build for themselves and extract even more salacious detail. She describes Yoshiko as “happily married,” but she’s living in a rundown house on the margins of the city. It seems her husband maybe ill and therefore unable to work. Yoshiko may have married him out of a lack of other options and it’s not clear if her husband knows about her past or how he would react if he learned of it now. The fact that Nami’s attempt to interview others about Yoshiko fails bears out the social stigma that can surround those who’ve experienced sexual assault and suggests that Yoshiko has now become an outcast. The photos that they publish only black out Yoshiko’s eyes making it easy for those in her community to identify her which could certainly make her life much more difficult and lead to a loss of employment or social further exclusion.

It’s clear that Nami hasn’t really thought any of this through and is only focussed on impressing her male editors to be given better assignments. This may in part be what she means when she says that she’s been assaulted in her office by the people she works with on gaining more of an insight into the consequences of her writing. Though he threatens to rape her himself, Muraki seems to be a representative of a more compassionate masculinity but at the same time has been emasculated, rendered impotent after his own wife was raped by an intruder and then left him because he couldn’t satisfy her sexually. He connects Nami with a mentally disturbed nurse who was assaulted by a doctor with an autopsy fetish, though the incident was covered up by the hospital. None of these men, except Muraki, is held responsible for their actions. Nami, however, becomes all of these women, envisioning herself abandoned at the scene half-naked and clothes torn, discarded on the rubbish tip of the modern society. At the beginning of the film, a woman smashes the lens of the camera as a man moves towards her, as if she meant to rebuke us for watching, while even Nami finds herself becoming dangerously aroused by watching other women being assaulted or listening to their stories before she too cracks and begins to see herself as nothing more than an anonymous object at the mercy of male society.

Angel Guts: Nami is available as part of The Angel Guts Collection released on blu-ray 23rd February courtesy of Third Window Films.

Angel Guts: Red Classroom (天使のはらわた 赤い教室, Chusei Sone, 1979)

Posted on by

Chusei Sone’s Angel Guts: Red Classroom (天使のはらわた 赤い教室, Tenshi no Harawata: Akai Kyoshitsu) opens with grainy 8mm footage of a woman being gang raped, but this turns out to be a film being watched by the protagonist, Muraki (Keizo Kanie), rather than the one we’re actually watching. Nevertheless, in presenting the footage in this way, the film has made us somewhat complicit in witnessing this woman’s exploitation for the purposes of entertainment. A producer of pornographic magazines, Muraki is captivated by the woman’s ruined innocence and becomes obsessed with the idea of finding her.

Though he says he doesn’t think she belongs in this world, Muraki does not so much want to save Nami (Yuki Mizuhara) as get her to work for his magazine. He declares that years of this kind of work have left him numbed and desensitised. Watching her video was the first time he’s felt moved in years. However, it turns out that this may be because the video wasn’t a movie in which the actress had consented to appear, but raw footage of an actual gang rape committed against a trainee teacher. The implication is that this traumatic incident has numbed Nami in the same way Muraki has been numbed by his exposure to pornography, leaving her with a permanently vacant, inscrutable expression and reducing her to nothing but a sexual object. Though the 8mm “blue movie” is an illegal form of pornography that can be watched only in underground clubs, she claims to have run into several men like Muraki who recognise her and has concluded that the only way to get rid of them is to satisfy their desire by sleeping with them. She says she won’t feel anything anyway, but has scars on her wrist and seems to have turned to potentially dangerous sex with random men as a means of self-harm.

Muraki refuses to sleep with her, but in Nami he seems to be looking for his own buried innocence and masking the shame he feels towards his line of work. His parents think he publishes books for children, he tells Nami, but rants to another woman that his magazines are all the same and he doesn’t know how to make them better. He can’t take the kind of pictures he wants to, because he wouldn’t be able to publish them under the increasingly strict censorship laws. Repeated references are made to the need to avoid showing any pubic hair which is considered obscene under Japanese law, though they’re otherwise free to depict scenes of sexual violence and degradation. Ironically, Muraki is unable to meet Nami at their rendezvous because he’s been arrested for breaking the Protection of Minors Act after having photographed a 15-year-old girl, though Muraki claims he was just trying to help her. He says she told him she was 19, recently arrived from Aomori and had been reduced to shoplifting, so he gave her a job out of the kindness of his heart.

It’s things like this that might have Muraki desperate to prove he’s not “scum” but a good man and an artist rather than a purveyor of pornography and exploiter of women. The film has its cake and eats it too, critiquing female exploitation but simultaneously trading on it, if doing its best to make the viewer feel at least conflicted. Three years later, Muraki is in a relationship with a woman he once exploited who couldn’t let him go and has fathered a child, but the papers are full of news about suicides and domesticity does not seem to him provide much of a refuge. He continues to search for Nami in order to reclaim his innocence, but discovers that she has become a vacant sex worker, ironically working at a bar called “blue” and the plaything of a man in a James Dean-style red jacked who has broken dreams of his own. Unlike Muraki, she has only fallen further, and he is ultimately forced to watch what his business has reduced her to as a group of men set on a captive high school girl like a pack of wolves, ironically echoing the opening sequence. Yet in the end, it’s Nami who frees him by literally showing Muraki the way out of this place as he urges her to leave though she seems to say it’s already too late. Looking at her own distorted image in a puddle, she no longer knows who she is and has no identity that is not forced upon her by a violent male gaze.

Angel Guts: Red Classroom is available as part of The Angel Guts Collection released on blu-ray 23rd February courtesy of Third Window Films.