Showtimes & Tickets Enter Zip Code:

THE GLAMOROUS LIFE OF SACHIKO HANAI
Directed by: Meike Mitsuru.
Produced by: Kinugawa Makahito, Morita Kazuto & Masuko Kyouichi.
Written by: Nakano Takao.
Director of Photography: Ito Hiroshi.
Edited by: Kaneko Naoki.
Music by: Kishioka Taro.
Released by: Palm Pictures.
Language: Japanese with English subtitles.
Country of Origin: USA. 90 min. Not Rated.
With: Emi Kuroda, Ito Takeshi, Hotaru Yukijiro & Matsue Tetsuaki.
DVD Features: Horny Home Tutor: Teacher’s Love Juice. “The Adventure of Sachiko Hanai” short. What is a Pink Film? Trailers

There’s an uproarious moment in the US trailer for The Glamorous Life of Sachiko Hanai when a critic’s quote flies up on the screen: “It’s like a cross between David Cronenberg and Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11.” Maybe that critic hasn’t seen enough Cronenberg or understood what Moore was going for with his film, but the comparison is pretty much asinine.

Sachiko Hanai can be classified as an awesomely bad movie. You know the kind, a real low-budget effort with schlock filmmaking techniques and dime store acting, worth every penny for all the wrong reasons. The DVD’s back cover boasts this film as being, basically, a porno for intellectuals, or rather as a pink film (a Japanese skin flick with limited nudity and sex and lots of bizarre theatrics to beef up the story). But the problem in taking this film seriously is that, frankly, it defies all logic whatsoever.

The plot, good lord… Sachiko Hanai is a sex-addicted young woman who gets shot in the forehead by a killer in a restaurant and somehow gets up, still walking. After bedding the police officer who helps her off the city street (not that she really knows because, well, she has a bullet in her forehead and is in shock), she takes a closer look and pushes the bullet further into her head and becomes suddenly an intellectual, very much into Noam Chomsky (or rather, Noam Chomski as his name is spelled in the subtitle), Nietzsche, Herman Melville, and so on. She continues to bed random men, like a librarian, and even a young boy she tutors on the side.

By the arrival of the “deux ex machine” (it’s spelled like that), try as I might, all hope was lost in trying to make out what was really going on story wise. The director and writer make such ridiculous claims regarding intellectual standpoints about practicalism vs. situationalism, Chomsky, philosophy, and mathematics that it doesn’t really matter except as the meat of true absurdist comedy. This is just one facet, and is funny enough, but it’s hard not to feel adrift when George W. Bush pops up on TV screens, dubbed over by some dastardly-sounding Japanese guy, making crazy claims to being the tyrant of the world and controller of minds (or is it so crazy?) Perhaps this is part of the director’s plan, to go for broke and make the movie such a far-out political satire in the guise of a sex comedy. But Meike Mitsuru is, in fact, a soft-core porno director, and his attempts at trying to reach the level of someone like Takashi Miike in balancing surreal gonzo filmmaking with excessive sexual situations falter – he can barely direct a shot without it shaking.

As the story and characters become more idiotic and a spy plot unfolds, it becomes clear this is a trashy spectacle of bizarre ideas thrown together randomly (if Meike or writer Takao Nakano ever read any Chomsky, I have a house to sell you) with several sex scenes of the purely Japanese variety (men hypersexually aroused, sometimes verging on rape). Simply put, if you’re looking for a do-it-yourself Mystery Science Theater 3000 movie of the moment to joke on mercilessly, this is it.

DVD Extras: These are even funnier, and just as pointless, as the feature itself. A short film, “The Adventure of Sachiko Hanai,” finds Sachiko having to fight both a big Japanese woman in blackface and a puppet of George W. Bush in equal measure (one of the corniest things I’ve seen in many years); Horny Home Tutor: Teacher’s Love Juice, the original version of the feature, is half an hour shorter and shot much better than the actual feature, though still lacking any sense; and the Japanese trailer shows the director on the phone trying to get the prime minister of Japan to listen to his film’s premise. Jack Gattanella
June 5, 2007