Saturday, April 15, 2006

[SIFF'06] The Glamorous Life of Sachiko Hanai

When I walked out of the theatre, someone commented to his friend if there was any deeper meaning to the film which he might have failed to realize. Sorry, I think it's safe to say that Glamorous Life is pure soft porn, disguised as an art house movie. There are plenty of movies like these (think Immortel), which somehow managed to come through unscathed by the censors and given the R21 rating for its release during SIFF here.

C'mon, I mean (and I'm not complaining - I enjoy the occassional sexy-sexy shows ok?) right from the beginning you're teased by Sachiko's butt and boobs. She's a call girl for hire, playing to her client's fantasies, like role playing a school teacher. One fine day, she got caught up in a restaurant shootout, and escaped alive with a bullet lodged in the head. She undergoes an unexplainable transformation, in terms of intelligence, gaining an insatiable desire for knowledge, as well as having a supercharged sex drive.

Bunking in with the family of a professor she seeked, more sex is assured with the professor and his introverted son. But the weirdness factor got upped through the introduction of George Bush's cloned finger (comes with the Stars-and-Stripes painted on the nail), which has telepathy, and a life of its own. Since it's a finger, there's no prizes guessing correctly what a finger gotta do. The movie becomes a cheap satire on Bush and his pro-war policies, and I'm not too sure if it's for pure cheesiness or a low production budget which led to wire-work not being cleaned up, and cheapo GI-Joe toy figurines substituting the real Joes, and a really tacky looking Bush who creatively uses his fingers over the airwaves.

As another subplot, the North Korean gunman who's looking for the finger, and was responsible for the bullet in Sachiko's head, ended up trying to hunt Sachiko down, through tracing her contact via her mobile phone, staking out inside her home (cleaning the home, keeping her red panties, and fantasizing), and through an incredible stroke of luck, got to the home of the professor to get to Sachiko. He provided much of the laughs (though I don't think most was intentional), as the gunfights he had (some which made not much sense) turned out to be rather comical instead.

I think I can count up till about at least seven sex scenes, and another equivalent number of masturbation scenes, for the reason that Sachiko doesn't feel a thing why having sex, and only feels the (pleasurable) effects some time after. Sexploitation? You tell me. Works out to be about one sex scene every 7 minutes.

It's one of those movies which almost every male character has sex with the female lead, and the female characters having the urge to remove (or forcefully so) their clothing. It's campy, it doesn't make much sense, and most of what you see on screen, is probably just for the sake of being there. You know not to take this movie seriously when the American national anthem accompanies the end credits, sung badly in Japanese, with an after-the-end-credits scene that simply just implodes.

If you're feeling horny, then this movie might just be your cup of tea.

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