Really Surprised!

Absolutely Fantastic

Absolutely brilliant

The first must-see film of the year.

This is the most under-rated movie on IMDb in terms of avg score rating. This is a sophisticated softcore counterpart to "ai no corrida" yet surpasses that film. This film is only an incredibly short 73 minutes long but says almost everything it set out to about the concrete nature of romance in a homosocial and cruel world. This is a realist and working class reclamation of the "passion beyond reason" genre. There are hints of death and perversion amidst dialogue of surpassing clarity. The long shots and absurdity remind me of Tsai Mian Liang. Maybe a dark sense of humour runs through this film, maybe actions in 1970s japan will always be funny to us because of cultural difference, however I belly laughed whilst watching this film but was also deeply moved. Beware, unless you are acquainted with Japanese 1970s pink movies the male leads will be so unsympathetic that you will have no appreciation for their difficulties. Beware also if you are a pinky violence collector only interested in the sex, it is deliberately reduced to clinical joint masturbation and this is a strangely unsexy movie. For everybody else, enjoy, this is profound, moving, funny, well observed, gritty, funny and most of all passionate.

Woman with Red Hair left me less than impressed. The story of a woman gang raped by a couple of construction workers / lorry drivers, it aspires to be everything that In the Realm of the Senses was, but this film mostly fails. As a comment on a misogynist society (where a women can be raped, abused, treated abysmally, offered as sexual pleasure to a workmate, and then fall hopelessly in love with her attacker) it barely tackles the issues. On a sexual level, whereas Realm of the Senses was both graphically explicit and dealt with sophisticated (if sometimes dubious) sexual practices including S&M and erotic asphyxiation, Woman with Red Hair merely has the shy kinkiness one might expect from err . . . lorry drivers. Themes such as sex during menstruation are handled more for a giggle than to question attitudes; and whereas Realm of the Senses had stunning visual beauty, historical accuracy and genuine drama, Woman with Red Hair has very unengaging characters; there is an occasional beautiful scene of touching beauty involving a bridge or landscape that might have been shot by a different director (and then we return to the unevolved humping!) Woman with Red Hair might be a comment on Japanese Cinema, but it is hardly one that inspires me as a western viewer. Perhaps some Japanese commentators could put it into context or point out something I've missed?