Kind of funny, kind of mean, very much porn.
The New York Asian Film Festival ran from June 30 to July 16. For more information about what you missed, click here.
Wet Woman In The Wind didn’t come together for me until the moment I realized it was a straight up porno.
Which is a process that took about 45 minutes.
In retrospect, even the mildest bit of research, or even simply taking the implications of the title at face value, would have made this quite clear – the film is actually one of five films created for the ‘Roman Porno Reboot Project’ spearheaded by Nikkatsu Studios to commemorate the 45th anniversary of their Roman Porno series of pink films that ran from 1971 to 1988.
A primer for the uninitiated: Pink films in Japan are basically any film where the focus is on sex and/or nudity. Nikkatsu Studios were higher budgeted than most, and the studio heads gave their creative types total freedom as long as they managed to check off the requirement of fitting in four nude or sex scenes per hour.
Think of it like the Roger Corman gravy train, but with boob quotas.
Which, now that I write it out, probably isn’t that much different after all…
Two other films in the cycle also played at NYAFF this yearr: Dawn Of The Felines and Aroused By Gymnopedies. While Gynmopedies (reviewed here by our own Dan Tabor) was a surrealist exploration of its hero’s psyche, Felines was so cinematic in its themes and staging that it didn’t even register to me as a porno.
Likewise, neither did Wet Woman In The Wind.
At first.
The film begins very simply, with a man finding a chair in the middle of the woods, which he puts on a cart he’s dragging behind him.
Suddenly, he is on a dock.
A woman on a bicycle rushes in from stage right, speeding off an adjacent dock, crashing into the water with the studied determination of a kamikaze pilot.
She pulls herself out of the water, and we notice her T-shirt, which reads “YOU NEED TISSUES FOR YOUR ISSUES.”
That shirt comes off IMMEDIATELY, as she wrings it out in front of our shocked man, not even introducing herself or asking his name before requesting she be allowed to crash at his place, as she has nowhere else to go.
The man runs away in what seems like abject terror.
The woman follows.
So that’s the first two minutes or so…
The film is slow in revealing its characters, but we eventually learn that the man is named Kosuke (Tasuku Nagaoka) and the woman is named Shiori (Yuki Mamiya, going real hard).
Shiori, for reasons known only to herself, latches onto Kosuke, playfully hopping onto his back and implying she’ll trade sex for money, only to inform him that he’ll be the one to pay.
But when Kosuke rejects her with some amount of force, Shiori turns in an instant. She vows that by the time she’s finished with him, he will be begging her to let him have his way with her.
To that end, the determined Shiori moves herself into Kosuke’s secluded cabin in the woods, prancing around naked and bringing strange men over to arouse his jealousy. Kosuke, trying to distance himself from women after a troubled romantic past, is driven first to distraction, than to near mania by her antics.
So, yeah… basically, it’s Hate Fuck: The Motion Picture.
Because I was unaware of the background going in to the film, I found myself confused by the general choppiness of it. Not much happens, and the characters don’t really feel like characters. For the opening thirty minutes or so, I was alternately amused and annoyed by how little things were seemed to be coming together.
Then the sex started.
And didn’t stop.
The final half hour of the film (the total runtime is a little under 80 minutes) is dedicated to an endless series of couplings between Kosuke and any woman besides Shiori who crosses his path; and Shiori, who has pretty much the same deal going on, but doesn’t hold the line at just men.
I mean, what is there to say, really? This is porn. Softcore porn, dutifully abiding by the rules established by Japanese law, which is considerably tamer than the stuff we’ve got in America. So for those used to the stuff you might find on Skinemax (let alone the stuff we know you’re all REALLY watching), this probably won’t move the needle, so to speak. And being a Japanese production, there’s a rather too glib treatment of rape or the threat of rape that won’t sit particularly well with American audiences. But the film never loses its sense of acerbic comic absurdity, and director Akihiko Shiota gives it a cinematic enough sheen that it goes down real easy… again, so to speak.
Wet Woman In The Wind: it’s kind of funny, it’s kind of mean, it’s very much porn.
So if you’re going to watch it, do it at home, probably.
Let’s all presume the trailer is not so much with the work safety:
