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Backstory
Three by the Japanese fest-circuit fave, who from his beginnings in the “pink film” (sexploitation) industry has moved on to more serious inquiries into the nature of sexual experience.
Feature
The stage-farcical I Am an SM Writer comes on sophomoric, with erotic author Ren Osugi scribbling orgasmically as his assistants truss each other up. But a more melancholy tone, affecting despite a thesis-driven structure, sets in as he and the missus fail to work out the kinks in their relationship.
Digital quickie Tokyo Trash Baby has a set-up — girl, too shy to declare her obsession to boy, rifles through boy’s garbage bags every night — that reads like the Tony Leung-Faye Wong portion of Chungking Express in reverse, and plays like Chungking Express sounds when you’re trying to explain it to someone who’s never seen it.
Vibrator stars the fearless Shinobu Terashima as Rei, a head case whose one-night stand in the cab of a truck turns into an intermittently cathartic road trip. Padded with blissed-out watching-the-world-fly-by ambience, and often leaning on parroted therapy-speak explanations for Rei’s bulimia and alcoholism, it’s perhaps a dry run for Hiroki’s It’s Only Talk, a closer and more ambiguous study of another of Terashima’s uncannily immersed depressives.
Extras
Director bio and filmography; SM Writer’s trailer.
Verdict
Does sexual frankness equal emotional honesty? It’s generally assumed that filmmakers and performers who aren’t shy about showing skin are open to knottier, more genuine truths than the ones accessible to the sheets-around-the-armpits crowd. But even sex scenes are written and directed, and Hiroki’s films are only as resonant as he is free of preconceptions.
Three by the Japanese fest-circuit fave, who from his beginnings in the “pink film” (sexploitation) industry has moved on to more serious inquiries into the nature of sexual experience.
Feature
The stage-farcical I Am an SM Writer comes on sophomoric, with erotic author Ren Osugi scribbling orgasmically as his assistants truss each other up. But a more melancholy tone, affecting despite a thesis-driven structure, sets in as he and the missus fail to work out the kinks in their relationship.
Digital quickie Tokyo Trash Baby has a set-up — girl, too shy to declare her obsession to boy, rifles through boy’s garbage bags every night — that reads like the Tony Leung-Faye Wong portion of Chungking Express in reverse, and plays like Chungking Express sounds when you’re trying to explain it to someone who’s never seen it.
Vibrator stars the fearless Shinobu Terashima as Rei, a head case whose one-night stand in the cab of a truck turns into an intermittently cathartic road trip. Padded with blissed-out watching-the-world-fly-by ambience, and often leaning on parroted therapy-speak explanations for Rei’s bulimia and alcoholism, it’s perhaps a dry run for Hiroki’s It’s Only Talk, a closer and more ambiguous study of another of Terashima’s uncannily immersed depressives.
Extras
Director bio and filmography; SM Writer’s trailer.
Verdict
Does sexual frankness equal emotional honesty? It’s generally assumed that filmmakers and performers who aren’t shy about showing skin are open to knottier, more genuine truths than the ones accessible to the sheets-around-the-armpits crowd. But even sex scenes are written and directed, and Hiroki’s films are only as resonant as he is free of preconceptions.
