Japanese “pink” films are something of a throwback in this day of instant hardcore on the Internet. Shot on 35 mm film, with properly scripted stories, fleshed-out characters and only simulated sex scenes (usually one every ten minutes, though the timing varies), “pink” films are shown in decaying theaters in urban entertainment districts. The patrons are largely middle-aged and older and, though some become fans of certain actresses, almost none pay attention to the directors.
Instead of resigning themselves to turning out their product like so many sausages, some pink directors have taken advantage of their audience’s accommodating nature to experiment, sometimes more daringly and imaginatively than their “straight” colleagues. One is Imaoka Shinji, who has been working in the “pink” industry for nearly two decades and, since becoming a director for the Kokuei company in 1995, has risen to the top ranks, with his films shown in ordinary theaters in Japan and at foreign film festivals.
His twelfth film, Uncle’s Paradise (Ojisan Tengoku, 2006) may still contain the requisite sex scenes, sometime shown in media res, with absolutely no preliminaries, but its story is a bizarre back-and-forth between dream and reality, earthly pleasures and hellish torments - in a literal hell.
There are precedents for this sort of this in Japanese cinema, including Nakagawa Nobuo’s 1960 classic Hell (Jigoku), with a third act devoted to a guided tour of the Buddhist version of Hades, complete with lotus flowers and a burning lake. Imaoka, however, had to create his hell on a zero budget - his antechamber to the inferno is a love hotel lobby, with Satan himself (or as he is known in Japan, Emma-sama) manning the desk.
This, of course, is ludicrous, but Uncle’s Paradise is not exactly a genre send-up. Instead it is an odd, shambling vision of middle-aged male horniness carried to its illogical - and horrific - extreme. The hero, the “uncle” of the title, not only has sex on the brain, but in his dream life, until it invades his waking existence in the form of a white-faced “dream woman” (Sasaki Yumeka, a guest at the 2002 Udine FEFJ).
The film’s first dream, however, is of the boyish Haruo (Yoshioka Mutsuo), who works at a marine products factory in the port of Kurume. It is, however, of fishing, not screwing. Soon, though, we are introduced to Haruo’s girlfriend and co-worker, the zaftig Rika (Aoyama Minami). Then, Haruo gets an unwanted visitor, his eccentric, irritable uncle Takayama Takashi (Shimomoto Shiro). He tells his nephew that he suffers from bad dreams of sex with the same woman, who each time reveals herself as a corpse. To keep from falling asleep he swigs a popular pep tonic. (One wonders if Kokuei signed a product placement deal with the manufacturer.)
Though he has no medical solution for his uncle’s dilemma, Haruo urges him to get a job. Despite his advanced age (which in Japanese employment terms means over 35), Takashi get hired as a pizza delivery guy - and quickly fall for a colleague, the tall, luscious Shiho (Hirasawa Rinako). When she sympathizes with him after a motorbike accident caused by his own carelessness, the impulsive Takashi grabs her in the company office - and one of the stranger sex bouts in “pink” film history commences. Not long after, at a convenience store, he meets his “dream girl” - come from the lower depths to claim him.
Pink film veteran Shimomoto Shiro plays Takashi as a comically pitiable sort, driven half out of his wits by his self-imposed insomnia and relentless sex drive, so why the title Uncle’s Paradise? Well, just wait until you see what “punishment” hell has in store. Only in the world of “pink” cinema - and the cracked imagination of Imaoka Shinji.