Not even in an early Woody Allen film are you likely to ever hear the name Noam Chomsky used as an aphrodisiac, but it is in the loony world of call-girl Sachiko Hanai. In spite of the competition from pinku and real pornography, both to be found on VHS and DVD and on the new, if still slow, internet, the pinku theatrical film somehow survived into the 21st century. With its minuscule budgets, pinku could also continue to be a place for young directors, for experimentation, and even for political satire that was not available to more mainstream productions. Arguably the most outrageous and flamboyant of these semi-underground films was the movie known on the international festival circuit as The Glamorous Life of Sachiko Hanai.*
Sachiko is a call-girl whose life is not all that glamorous. After a session pretending to be a private tutor, she goes to a cafe to meet her next client. But she has gone to the wrong cafe, where she witnesses a murder. Being a thoroughly modern girl, instead of hiding or running, she whips out her cell phone for a photo and is shot herself. But in the mix-up, a secret cylinder like a large lipstick is scooped up into her bag, and this cylinder is what the shooter was after.
As the hitman tries to track her down, she wanders the streets with a hole in her forehead and is screwed by the policeman who offered to help her. But the bullet in her brain has given her amazing new powers. She can learn all the world’s literature and philosophy with a single scan of books at a bookstall or the library, which leads her to sex with a professor in his office. Because she can discuss Kant and Chomsky and Melville and Poe while also having sex, he brings her home to tutor his son and provide something more for him on the side. The wife hires a detective who turns out to have been the murderer as well, and he wants the little canister, which we learn contains a perfect clone of George W. Bush’s finger.
This all occurs at the time Bush was invading Afghanistan and Iraq, and the finger gets loose and does a little invading of the caves of Sachiko’s body as well, with Bush talking to her personally from a rolling TV screen that magically appears on the roof. The shooter turns out to be working for the North Koreans, who want the finger because it will allow them to control all of America’s missiles, eventually leading to a shoot-out in a secret computer lair.
In addition to her super-intelligence, the bullet has given Sachiko strange powers of perception. Sometimes she can see and feel things in the future, sometimes her own senses are delayed so she only tastes the hot curry long after she ate it or suddenly starts to orgasm in the middle of dinner, long after the sex with the family son.
We see a great deal of Emi Kuroda. There is even pubic hair, though this may be because director Mitsuru Meike issued a different print to film festivals overseas in 2005 than he had released in Japan, so it had not been fogged out. And there is a lot of semen spurting not only onto Kuroda but even directly at the camera, something my limited visits into pinku territory had not seen before. The humor is vulgar and sophomoric, though the hitman cleaning Sachiko’s apartment while he waits is certainly an unexpected touch. Nevertheless, it is often still funny. The special effects are primitive – Bush is played by a man wearing a cardboard mask and the hole in Sachiko’s forehead changes in almost every shot – as you might expect in any movie made on a shoe-string budget.
As we often saw in the sixties before pinku became a real genre, independent films with nudity and sex scenes often provided a way to openly express anti-Americanism. Wakamatsu in particular, in his early days when he was a friend of Oshima, had often mixed politics with the sex. Other pinku directors over the years claimed to enjoy making the films for the freedom of social criticism that these movies allowed. Sachiko Hanai reminds us of that freedom as it also reminds those who lived through the Bush era (and those who may be too young to remember) that there was world-wide public outrage about the Bush administration’s approach to the rest of the world and about the Iraq invasion in particular. No place was safe from Bush’s finger, whether it might be a country, the button that could destroy the entire world, or even the vagina of a woman half-way round the world. And no one was quite sure that Bush even knew what he was doing, any more than did Sachiko. It takes considerable outrage to make a movie in Japan (or anywhere else) in which the North Koreans turn out to be the heroes who are trying to save the world, but also considerable playfulness to express it as a sex farce.
* The Japanese title is actually
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