Kandagawa Pervert Wars / Kandagawa inran senso (1983)

Many Japanese directors in the seventies and eighties found their way into film through pinku productions, but no one used that experience to find such commercial and artistic success in other genres as did Kiyoshi Kurosawa (no relation). This gives Kandagawa Pervert Wars, his first “full-length” commercial movie, a greater significance than it probably deserves, since the movie itself is a mess and it is not at all like his later movies that defined J-Horror, such as Pulse and Cure, or his subtle festival-winning films Journey to the Shore or Tokyo Sonata.

Unlike Sogo Ishii, whose student-project-like films of the eighties were angry and violent, Kurosawa seems to be on a lark.  Unlike Kumashiro, the critical darling of the pinku genre, Kurosawa approaches his first pink film as a joke rather than an exercise in New Wave; though he was in his late twenties, it looks and feels like a film student project for someone about 20 who hasn’t quite digested Ionesco and the other absurdist playwrights of the sixties or the dozens of films he has studied in classes.Though there are obvious suggestions of Hitchcock and Godard, it really feels like a Robert Altman film with what looks and sounds like a lot of improvised dialogue and action. Think M*A*S*H with all the war stuff cut out and nothing remaing but the sex talk, spying, raids, and even a trick to give a young man proof that he can have real sex after all, plus the narrated credits at the end.

In its less than an hour length, there is a lot of “sex.” A nude or semi-nude woman is on screen at least 75% of the time, and before we’re done, we’ve seen fakes of straight sex in numerous positions, lesbian sex, cunnilingus, fellatio, and female masturbation, with women under, over, lying, sitting, kneeling, and standing. But no one is going to be much stimulated; the only scene not interrupted by goofy camera work or editing is Aki’s masturbation episode.

There is a plot of sorts. Aki has brought home a guy from work and they have had sex ten times (he marks them down on a poster beside the mattress) but she has never had an orgasm. Her neighbor Masami, to distract herself from the noises next door, has been watching the apartment building across the “river” Kandagawa, where she discovers a student cramming for university entrance exams. As he stares at the wall covered with the names of movies Mom steps in front of him, lifts her blouse, and begins to suckle him. Out of boredom and/or outrage, the two young women decide to “rescue” the boy from this incest, each attempt ending up with them falling into the river. Finally they trap Mom in a sleeping bag and proceed to rape the young man, after which Mom and the girls fight for the boy in the river. Mom is sent floating downstream on a convenient raft and Aki and the boy have sex again outdoors on the roof of the apartment building, after which they both fall off.

The movie names posted on the wall are all American or European – we see Alphaville and Fort Apache and many in between (some of these are misspelled, like Two Road Together, so Kurosawa may have been having another joke about film school).

Though made by a company called Million Dollar, the movie looks like it had a total budget of $75 at most. Still, it is playful, even childish, and the sex involves no torture or violence. It demonstrates that, as long as you had a certain number of bare breasted scenes, you could do pretty much whatever you wanted in the pinku genre. And it also shows us the long distance traveled by Kurosawa before he became a sort of eminence grise of subtle contemporary Japanese movie-making.