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Dirty Movies
Asian cinema has action—and we don't mean car crashes.
By Stephen Short
2-10-2004
Hong Kong - Just because Asian movies don't smother the screen with sex doesn't
mean a lot of filmmakers aren't, um, doing it. Sex and identity are in. Be it
adultery, homosexuality, lesbianism or good new-fashioned sadomasochism, Asian
filmmakers and audiences are insatiable.
Hong Kong director Wong Kar-wai's frank and ground-breaking Happy Together was
among the first to transcend the sexually conventional in 1997. He undressed
every girl's bedroom pin-ups, Leslie Cheung and Tony Leung Chiu-wai, and
started the first few minutes of his movie with a scene showing exactly what
men do to each other in bed. At one stroke, amid much audience perturbation, he
unmoored the taboos and let them float flamboyantly close to the mainstream.
Asian audiences were intoxicated and its filmmakers' impulses raged against
society's machinery, creating a new cinematic landscape of sexual ambiguity and
opportunity.
Nowhere more so than in South Korea. The country's censors banned homosexuality
on screen in any form until 1998, despite allowing hot-action het-sex and an
alarming amount of rape. For the hottest het-sex in Asia see Korean debutante
Jung Ji-woo's Happy End—which won awards at last year's Cannes—with bonking
that bests French director Jean-Jacques Beineix's Betty Blue for realistic
moan-groan quotient and full-body bump and grind. Today, it seems, Korean
directors can do just about anything. 1999's Yellow Hair was a sex shebang with
orgies and lesbianism that left the viewer with third-degree eyeball burns.
That year's Lies by Sun Woo-Jang was a sado-masochistic romance between a
married sculptor and a high-school girl half his age, a class-act film that
fashioned poetry from pornography and high-fived the current zeitgeist, though
it is banned in Korea.
Two Korean films currently doing the festival rounds challenge both censors and
viewers. Im Sang Soo's Tears is a mindlessly violent, sex-charged flick shot in
cine-veritE style in a hellish-looking Seoul. Full of pimps, prostitutes and
drugs galore, it's grubby stuff with girls furtively delivering hand shandies
(though the filmmaker doesn't show the offending organs), and the cold, unfelt
sex doesn't make for aesthetic delirium, but then neither should it. This is
cinematic confrontation that resists escape. Kim Tae Yong's Memento Mori is a
contemporary teenage-lesbo-horror-psycho casserole that keeps its clothes on
and takes the time to show emotional need, longing and the denial of love. It's
a chick flick for the new world of Asian sexual cinema.
So too is Japanese filmmaker Kaze Shindo's first film Love/Juice, an
am-I-or-aren't-I lesbian story that won her Rookie of the Festival award in
Berlin three weeks ago. Interesting territory even for Japan: two roommates,
lesbian photographer Chinatsu (Okuno Mika) and friend Kyoko (Chika Fujimura),
do drugs, sleep and brush teeth together. Chinatsu quickly falls in love with
Kyoko. They kiss and touch one another—Chinatsu shows the uninitiated Kyoko how
to masturbate—but the latter recoils from physical love. A stronger movie would
have started where this one leaves off, but it's a compact, spare tale shot in
night-blue tones, which may ultimately be a metaphor for Japan's listless youth
rather than a vigorous statement on sexual identity.
Japan's manga culture is awash with sexual fluidity and deviance but few of
those grinning gross-out stories have made it to the big screen. One notable
exception is 1999's Sasayaki (Moonlight Whispers), a feature-film by Akihiko
Shiota. Two 17-year-olds, Takuya (Kenji Mizuhashi) and Satsuki (Tsugumi), start
a conventional romance but Takuya's needs are anything but. First he tells
Satsuki to treat him like a dog. Then unbeknown to her, he smells her socks,
photographs her legs (how Japanese cinema loves voyeuristic kink) and wants to
kiss her feet and suck her toes. She discovers his obsessions, and forces him
to sit in a closet watching her having sex with another man. When finished, she
pleads with Takuya to lick her top-to-bottom. More mind game than full-on
physical celebration, restraint stamps this surprisingly accomplished film—a
kind of miracle considering its origin in a comic book. Asian filmmakers are
pulling sexy miracles out of hats like rabbits. And we all know what rabbits
are famous for.
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