Director – Shinji Somai – 1985 – Japan – Cert. 18 – 88m
***1/2
After violently taking out the stress of yakuza business debts on a call-girl, a man finds her two years later and attempts to rekindle a relationship – roman porno is out on UK Blu-ray on, Monday, July 22nd
NSFW.
Tokyo. Muraki (Minori Terada) phones Milky Way from room 301, all dark suit and shades, obviously a gangster, to be is told a girl, Yumi, will be with him in 10 minutes. Only, a flashback reveals him as the owner of a publishing office, his stairwell to his small office premises blocked by a yakuza, another of whose number, he discovers on entering, is forcibly having sex with Muraki’s wife (Kiriko Shimizu) while two further fellow yakuza look on approvingly. Later, he considers throwing himself out of the third storey window of his unfurnished office with “for rent” signs, but swats a fly and thinks better of jumping.
When Yumi (Noriko Hayami) arrives at 301, her initial euphoria at Y100 000 for two hours is dispelled when Muraki unexpectedly slaps handcuffs on her, pulls a knife, slashes at the bedsheets and her clothing to undress her than violates her with a dildo, later cutting the skin between her breasts as she writhes orgasmically.
This is disturbing stuff, partly because both the wife in the office and the cuffed call-girl in the love hotel room seem to be sensually enjoying acts of rape, which doesn’t really ring true (an opening restoration title card coyly talks about inappropriate portrayals yet attempting to honour the director’s intent, so I guess Japanese Studio Nikkatsu know this is a bit off, at least in hindsight) and partly because it’s showing the violation of women as a weapon (used by, first, loan sharks, and then, a suicidal man who wants to take out his stress and frustration on a whore), which rings much truer.
Two years later he’s working as a taxi driver, a profession pregnant with cinematic baggage if there ever was one, and living in a small bedsit visited by his seemingly content and sexually enthusiastic ex-wife, who he has divorced to protect her from his yakuza debt. In his cab one night, he spots Yumi walking and picks her up. She asks to go to Yokohama to see the ocean. At the quayside, she removes her shoes but is prevented from jumping into the water by Muraki. She denies her name is Yumi (she will later be referred to as Nami) and makes her escape, subsequently realising she’s lost an earring.
Daytime. She fends off nuisance phone calls in her flat. She does an above board clothes photo shoot for a department store. Later, as Miss Tsuchiya, she books his cab to Shinjuku. They talk, she remembers him, he promises he isn’t planning to blackmail her. She asks him to take her out for a meal sometime. Cut to her with another man (Nobutaka Matsutomi) having athletic sex in his house flat (with some of her explicit anatomy blurred out, as per Japanese censorship rules) and a post-coital discussion in which she talks about him finding her earring before his wife does.
Still, she goes with Muraki to the harbour to search for her earring. He gives her a record of a tune she liked earlier in his cab, she comes with him back to his flat, but doesn’t come in. At work, she has a furious row with the boss’ wife (Rie Nakagawa) for sleeping with him. Later, she phones the boss and he hangs up on her. That doesn’t stop her delivering a lengthy, after the fact diatribe in which she effectively dumps him.
Coming round to Muraki’s flat, she wants to restage that night, but he’s embarrassed. It would seem it turned her on. First she says don’t worry about what you did, then that he’s not rough enough. Then she starts goading him, and he hits her. She complains she got fired from work because her past life came out. Later, he visits her boss and wife to get back the incriminating papers about her past life off them. And Muraki goes to the same hotel room where she again visits him. By the end, she and his ex are visiting his flat to drop off bags, passing each other in the streets like strangers.
One of the most strangely affecting things here is the location outside Muraki’s railside apartment, illuminated by the light from trains passing in the night. When she sits outside his door at night in torrential rain, it recalls him looking out of his cleared office window two years earlier, contemplating suicide in similarly torrential rain.
The first 13 minutes are extremely powerful, and the images of yakuza violence (and anti-female violence at that) sear their way into your consciousness. But somehow, the rest of the story, the main two years later section, doesn’t really affect the viewer in the same way. It was made under Nikkatsu’s roman porno production programme, and you can feel it delivering the required amount of sex scenes and nudity, with Somai feeling his way toward something more meaningful. It seems to work in places, but, on initial viewings at least, never quite hangs together as a whole.
It’s clearly bread and butter work, of interest as part of a director’s wider body of work. It isn’t a patch on such challenging Somai works as Typhoon Club (1985) or Luminous Woman (1987), also available from Third Window Films, but then it probably never set out to be.
Third Window’s Blu-ray includes a commentary by critic Jasper Sharp, quite helpful in terms of understanding Nikkatsu’s roman porno films alongside the more established line of pink cinema and a filmed interview with lead actor and Somai regular Minori Terada by Koji Enokido, assistant director on a number of early Somai films.
Love Hotelis out on Blu-ray in the UK on Monday, July 22nd.
Trailer: