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“To felines everywhere”
There is a sequence in Kazuya Shiraishi’s Dawn Of The Felines that unfolds thusly: Yui (Satsuki Maue), an escort for ‘Young Wives Paradise’, drags her co-workers Masako (Juri Ihata) and Hitomi to a comedy club. Her new client/potential boyfriend Yohei (Hideaki Murata) has invited her to see him perform (for some reason, afterwards it becomes an S&M stage show. Japan is an eclectic place, you guys…); when Yui abandons them for a tryst with her creepy funnyman, Masako and Hitomi take off into the night, laughing all the way.
They realize this is the first time they’ve been out together, and ponder how to define their relationship: friends? Colleagues? Something else entirely? And while the handheld camera trails them from behind parked cars and bushes like a stalker, Hitomi reveals the deeply sad reason she turned to escorting, and how it gives her strength.
Masako ponders how long they can reveal their bodies and give themselves to strangers.
With a knowing, weary laugh, Hitomi responds, “As long as there are men.”
Hitomi takes a cab, leaving Masako by herself. And as she walks away, all the bonhomie of the evening falls away, and her face crumples as the weight of Hitomi’s words threaten to crush her.
Everything that transpires in Dawn Of The Felines will come as little surprise to anyone familiar with in the ins and outs of the hooksploitation genre (did I just make up a new word? I think I did…): we meet the ladies, we see them on and off the clock, and we try to figure out which client is eventually going to try and murder them.
Of everyone, Yui is the one who seems most destined for some kind of reckoning: a quietly desperate, irresponsible mother, she makes an uneasy initial impression, dropping a mere 3000 yen to pawn her child off on some random dude (Takaki Uda as the deceptively skeezy looking Mikami) who agrees to look after him for two days. But once she’s on the clock, she reveals a comic side, with her bad attitude and inability to hide her disgust at her gross clients costing her work and leading to an amusing pep talk from Nonaka (Takuma Otoo), the owner of Young Wives Paradise. But the shadow of her initial introduction lingers in the background, with later revelations about her treatment of her son and her assignations with super intense aspiring comedian Yohei seeming to point towards an inevitable bad end.
Her co-worker Rie (the monomonikered Michie), on the other hand, seems all-too put together. An elegant, sylphlike presence, Rie’s main client is the lonely widower Kaneda (Ken Yoshizawa), who demands nothing but the pleasure of her company, never going so far as to sleep with her. To that point, when she tries to arouse him by masturbating with a vibrator in the back of a taxi, he politely asks her to stop. Kaneda’s kindness and melancholy compels Rie to try and fix him the only way she knows how; by getting him to come. But of course, both of them are keeping secrets that, when they get revealed, will almost certainly end badly for everyone involved.
So is Rie the doomed one?
Or perhaps it’s Masako after all.
Masako has been at it for a year. She never comes with the customers. She visits Takada (Tomohiro Kaku), a relatively new client.
“Strip,” he commands as he listlessly stares at his computer screen. It is their third time together. He offers he 10,000 yen in addition to his usual 2400 to upgrade to full-on sex, which he tosses on the couch with an almost performative disdain.
Afterwards, they have pizza.
Living in a space in the office that’s about the size of a closet (or it might just be a closet) and seemingly dragging her entire existence behind her in a ratty plaid carry-on, the reality of Hitomi’s words drive her to seek comfort in the arms of the eccentric Takada, a shut-in who spends all day and all night surfing the internet, passing judgment on what he sees as the liars, hypocrites, and reprobates of the world. He treats Masako with a bewildering mix of offhanded kindness and equally casual cruelty. But he makes her feel something, and for a woman adrift, that has to be enough. She offers herself, body and soul, to Takada. But accepting that sort of devotion would force Takada to engage in the world on a human level, a sacrifice he may not be willing to make.
So it’s Masako, right? Definitely Masako.
In the end, it might not even make a difference in the first place…
Womens’ bodies are little but property in this movie, and almost every moment reflects that, from the throwaway moment where Nonaka has another worker impersonate Hitomi when the she fails to show up at the office to the wobbly leering of the camera in the moments when one of the ladies undresses for a client. Even a waitress is first introduced with the camera framed squarely on her chest as she brings our ladies their noodles. In the world of Dawn Of The Felines, women are mostly commerce.
But this isn’t exploitation; or if it is, it’s exploitation that knows exactly what it’s doing. Make no mistake, the world sees these women as commodities. And when they’re in the presence of one of their johns, the camera reflects as much. But when they’re away from hungry eyes, in the office or enjoying a casual lunch together, their humanity is returned to them, and they’re fooling around on their phones, painting their nails, simply living their lives… just like the rest of us.
It’s this visual gambit, and its matter-of-fact, even handed look at the life of the escort, that raises Dawn Of The Felines above the usual trash. Come to that, its general moral neutrality might be the most perverse thing about it. There is an almost shocking lack of judgment here, either for or against our heroines as they grind out a living (so to speak). Some people do good, some do bad, but every last one of them is awarded a certain humanity, a certain dignity.
And as dark as things get, the film maintains a mordant sense of humor about itself, best displayed in the form of Boss Nonaka. Far from the threatening pimp one tends to imagine in these scenarios, Nonaka comes off as a harried camp counselor, who even (inexplicably enough) has his own jaunty theme music. Otoo’s gruff and smarmily conniving performance is an unexpected delight in a vast sea of existential angst.
The icy cool transactional sexual roundelays of Dawn Of The Felines might not be the sort of thing one would watch for the turn-on; it’s not really playing that game. But not unlike the ladies of Young Wives Paradise themselves, that in no way means it’s not worth the price of admission.
NOTE: There are no actual cats in this movie.
