Japanese film people will often tell you that Japanese directors don’t do comedy very well. If they are talking about the box office, they have a point - the masses are often reluctant to pay for big screen laughs when they can get them for free on the tube.
But if they are implying an inability to make funny movies in original or outlandish ways, they are flat wrong. One case in point is Meike Mitsuru’s The Glamorous Life of Sachiko Hanai (Hanai Sachiko no Karei no Shogai). Originally intended for the fleapits that show “pink”(softcore porno) films to elderly heavy breathers, it has been picked by the international festival circuit and praised by eminent critics and scholars.
No wonder - the 36-year-old Meike, who has long been laboring in the pink netherworld, has produced a weird, hilarious wet dream for intellectuals. As the film begins, the eponymous heroine (Kuroda Emi) is working as a “teacher” in an “image club” (a sex establishment where the whores role-play in costume). Blessed with a curvy figure, but otherwise entirely ordinary, Sachiko becomes an unwilling witness to a shooting in a coffee shop - and takes a round from the killer (Ito Takeshi) that lodges in her brain.
Instead of silencing her forever, however, the bullet sends her IQ soaring. She devours books by Kant, Sartre, Sontag and Chomsky and starts spouting brainy babble, like the Tin Man after getting his diploma from the Wizard of Oz. She visits seedy Professor Saeki (Hotaru Yukijiro), who authored one of her favorite tomes, and soon has his glasses steaming. Having found his ultimate erotic playmate, who can quote from The Critique of Pure Reason as she climaxes, Saeki installs her in his home as a tutor to his nerdy son (Matsue Tetsuaki), while his skeptical wife (Hayami Kyoko) wonders what is really going on behind closed doors. Meanwhile, Sachiko’s would-be killer - a North Korean spy - is on her trail to not only finish what he started, but retrieve the cloned finger of George Bush that Sachiko picked up on her dazed way out the coffee shop door.
While following the pink formula - one scene of simulated sex every ten minutes or so - the film offers hope to all the guys in the seats who look more like Sachiko’s schlumpy sex partners than Brad Pitt. It also broadly satirizes everything from academic pretension to the foreign policy of George Bush, whose wiggly finger conducts its own “invasion” between Sachiko’s thighs, while an actor wearing a Dubya mask smirks and makes loopy comments from a nearby TV monitor.
Boosted by Kuroda Emi’s skilled erotic contortions (as well as by her ability to rattle off her pseudo-intellectual dialogue as though she really understands it) and Nakano Takao’s deeply wacky script, The Glamorous Life of Sachiko Hanai rises above the smutty genre run to minor classic status, sex comedy division. Coming soon to a film study curriculum near you.