Wong Kar-wai's movie "Happy Together" put homosexuality on the mainstream map.
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Which of the following is your favorite position?
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Do you have great sex with your spouse?
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Dirty Movies
Asian cinema has action—and we don't mean car crashes
By STEPHEN SHORT Hong Kong
Just because Asian movies don't smother the screen with sex doesn't mean a lot of filmmakers aren't, um, doing it. Sex and identity are in. Be it adultery, homosexuality, lesbianism or good new-fashioned sadomasochism, Asian filmmakers and audiences are insatiable.
Hong Kong director Wong Kar-wai's frank and ground-breaking Happy Together was among the first to transcend the sexually conventional in 1997. He undressed every girl's bedroom pin-ups, Leslie Cheung and Tony Leung Chiu-wai, and started the first few minutes of his movie with a scene showing exactly what men do to each other in bed. At one stroke, amid much audience perturbation, he unmoored the taboos and let them float flamboyantly close to the mainstream. Asian audiences were intoxicated and its filmmakers' impulses raged against society's machinery, creating a new cinematic landscape of sexual ambiguity and opportunity.
Nowhere more so than in South Korea. The country's censors banned homosexuality on screen in any form until 1998, despite allowing hot-action het-sex and an alarming amount of rape. For the hottest het-sex in Asia see Korean debutante Jung Ji-woo's Happy End—which won awards at last year's Cannes—with bonking that bests French director Jean-Jacques Beineix's Betty Blue for realistic moan-groan quotient and full-body bump and grind. Today, it seems, Korean directors can do just about anything. 1999's Yellow Hair was a sex shebang with orgies and lesbianism that left the viewer with third-degree eyeball burns. That year's Lies by Sun Woo-Jang was a sado-masochistic romance between a married sculptor and a high-school girl half his age, a class-act film that fashioned poetry from pornography and high-fived the current zeitgeist, though it is banned in Korea.
Two Korean films currently doing the festival rounds challenge both censors and viewers. Im Sang Soo's Tears is a mindlessly violent, sex-charged flick shot in cine-veritE style in a hellish-looking Seoul. Full of pimps, prostitutes and drugs galore, it's grubby stuff with girls furtively delivering hand shandies (though the filmmaker doesn't show the offending organs), and the cold, unfelt sex doesn't make for aesthetic delirium, but then neither should it. This is cinematic confrontation that resists escape. Kim Tae Yong's Memento Mori is a contemporary teenage-lesbo-horror-psycho casserole that keeps its clothes on and takes the time to show emotional need, longing and the denial of love. It's a chick flick for the new world of Asian sexual cinema.
So too is Japanese filmmaker Kaze Shindo's first film Love/Juice, an am-I-or-aren't-I lesbian story that won her Rookie of the Festival award in Berlin three weeks ago. Interesting territory even for Japan: two roommates, lesbian photographer Chinatsu (Okuno Mika) and friend Kyoko (Chika Fujimura), do drugs, sleep and brush teeth together. Chinatsu quickly falls in love with Kyoko. They kiss and touch one another—Chinatsu shows the uninitiated Kyoko how to masturbate—but the latter recoils from physical love. A stronger movie would have started where this one leaves off, but it's a compact, spare tale shot in night-blue tones, which may ultimately be a metaphor for Japan's listless youth rather than a vigorous statement on sexual identity.
Japan's manga culture is awash with sexual fluidity and deviance but few of those grinning gross-out stories have made it to the big screen. One notable exception is 1999's Sasayaki (Moonlight Whispers), a feature-film by Akihiko Shiota. Two 17-year-olds, Takuya (Kenji Mizuhashi) and Satsuki (Tsugumi), start a conventional romance but Takuya's needs are anything but. First he tells Satsuki to treat him like a dog. Then unbeknown to her, he smells her socks, photographs her legs (how Japanese cinema loves voyeuristic kink) and wants to kiss her feet and suck her toes. She discovers his obsessions, and forces him to sit in a closet watching her having sex with another man. When finished, she pleads with Takuya to lick her top-to-bottom. More mind game than full-on physical celebration, restraint stamps this surprisingly accomplished film—a kind of miracle considering its origin in a comic book. Asian filmmakers are pulling sexy miracles out of hats like rabbits. And we all know what rabbits are famous for.
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