Movie Details
| Title: | The Glamorous Life of Sachiko Hanai | |
| Director: | Mitsuru Meike | |
| Year: | 2003 | |
| Genre: | Sexploitation | |
| Times Seen: | 1 | |
| Last Seen: | 10.22.05 |
Other Movies Seen By This Director (0)
| Date Viewed | Venue | Note |
| 10.22.05 | Landmark Dobie | This Screening is part of event: Austin Film Festival 2005 AFF's only midnight showing is a Japanese film about a prostitute who's shot in the head and becomes supra-intelligent and somewhat psychic. A clone of George W. Bush's finger is also involved. This is what's called a Pink Film in Japan. It's basically softcore porn that's shown in special theaters, usually only an hour long and shown in sets of three. This movie is also sort of a regular film though, with a plot (kind of), a social message, and some truly bizarre images. The mixture of the two creates a pretty interesting effect that, depending on your comfort level with sex, is either really fun or really offensive. The majority of the Q&A with director Mitsuru Meike (more on this later) revolved around what exactly a Pink Film is. My personal take on it is something very similar to the sexploitation drive-in movies of the 70s. The sex is simulated (at least I think it is), and there's enough character and story to elevate it from hardcore porn but the effect is about the same... to have a good time with it and look at pretty girls. This particular movie is just crazy. It's the only film I've seen at AFF so far that could maybe fit in at QT or FantasticFest. I mean, read the plot synopsis again. This girl gets SHOT IN THE HEAD. She spends the entire movie walking around with an open bullet wound in the middle of her forehead. She sticks stuff into the hole to get psychic feelings about them, and even ends up having sex with the guy that shot her. The bullet in her brain does wreak some havoc however. Aside from making her incredibly intelligent and able to absorb information and ideas at an astounding rate (a la Phenomenon), she has increasingly delayed sensations. She'll drink coffee that's sickeningly sweet and not taste it for a half hour, or have sex with someone and not get aroused until an onslaught of pleasure hits her at some inopportune time. Just imagine watching a movie like this. The net effect is still watching a hot girl constantly writhing with pleasure, tearing the clothes off her body and having sex with every male member of the cast, but the idea behind it is great. She even has sex with a Ph.D. while spouting off about Noam Chomsky and Sandra Sonntag. The professor is so turned on that "Noam CHomsky" takes a pavlovian effect on him whenever he hears the name. Of course this is Japanese sexploitation though so certain staples of their culture still prevail (e.g. rape and excessive use of "money" in tactfully-composed money-shots). So where does George W. Bush's finger come in? Well, it's stolen because it can arm the "Deus Ex Machina," a briefcase of random buttons and gears that's supposed to be a remote trigger for America's nuclear arsenal. The finger moves and talks however, floating or flopping along once outside of it's makeshift lipstick case and even managing to tunnel into Sachiko on a rooftop while a television set shows a guy with a cardboard George W. head affecting lude gestures with his hands. I guess you could call it a rape scene, but it's certainly the most creative rape on film that I've ever seen. The finger gives her knowledge of the nuclear trigger and lets her know where to go. The movie ends with a spectacular conclusion that I really hate to give away. I will just say to be sure to stay for the end credits because the movie manages to take from 2001 in some sort of bizarre epilogue that is too weird to be anything but cool. The Q&A afterward was severely uncomfortable. The director had a few translators up there carrying on five-minute conversations before we would get an answer like "he was just saying that Pink Film used to have rape scenes all the time but not so much anymore, and that he doesn't think this rape scene fits in the movie but it's in there." Add to that a general dominance of people asking about Pink Film in general (what it is, what it's like, how culturally accepted it is), a misguided question about Takashi Miike coming from a guy clearly not seeing the movie he thought he was seeing, and a few general comments like "I think your message was hindered by the sex," and we were really only left with a few actual questions of the director. -This was made around the time that the U.S. went to war with Iraq and, although a lot of people in Japan opposed the war, the Japanese government sided with Bush and went to war anyway, so there was a lot of resentment from some of the people. This is his 8th film and although this is sort of a mixture between Pink film and regular film, he's only done Pink films in the past. He hopes to segue into regular film though, and it's a pretty established path to go from working for a production company to directing pink films to directing regular films. He's using it as a stepping stone (to this, some guy mentioned that Eli Roth had to lower himself and do horror films in order to get an opportunity to do real films, like it's low or immoral to actually like doing horror. Jerkass). The information in the above paragraph took about a half hour to get. It was still a fascinatingly odd film and I'm very glad I saw it, even if i had to ping-pong my head back and forth to read the subtitles between two heads in front of me. Damn Dobie. BONUS PARAGRAPH JUST FOR MY JOURNAL: Since I'm pretty sure I'll never be able to see this movie again, I just want to make sure that I remember that she uses Bush's finger to trigger a nuclear war at the end, then the bullet falls out of her forehead as she's walking along the beach with missiles coming down in the background. Then there's a shot of action figures in front of a backdrop moving around in complete Troma style, voices saying "help! no! we're all doomed!" dubbed in. It has to be one of the best scenes in the movie, totally friggin hilarious. |
