TJSFF 6 - Short-Short Reviews

I've been going to the Toronto Japanese Short Film Festival for a few years now. The festival comes in 4 or more programs shown at different times over three or four days.
I usually select the program based on a glance at the stills and the titles on the festival website. 90 percent of the time this works, but be warned: it can also be very dangerous.
I spent an entire Saturday night once at the Images Festival watching people suffocate themselves with saran wrap, call for their mommy, get their faces stepped on and punch themselves. Even worse, I dragged a friend with me.
Last night's program was generally very good.

'The Milky Audition"
Directed by Yumi Yoshiyuki, a former 'Pink Film' actress. The video appears to be a remake of an eighties video for a racy song with some minor sexual content. It was a video from that frantic workout genre of 80's music.
I didn't quite get this one. We saw Yumi Yoshiyuki imitating the video on stage, saw her play a callgirl, dressing up in fantasy costumes and being sent to jobs to sleep with men, and saw her almost nude, tied in japanese rope-bondage style, dancing and singing all the while.
What struck me most about this video was seeing her act thirty years younger than her age. I'm still not used to seeing an older woman positioning herself as the sex object in a film, showing her naked body shamelessly. I wonder if this speaks to western ideas about aging and sexuality, or if there's a whole other layer of satire to this video that I didn't get.
"The Swimming Restricted Area"
Couldn't find much info on this one. It was a bit disturbing for me...but perhaps I'm a bit of a prude. 6 young people drag themselves out of a love hotel in the hot summer morning sun, hung-over and grumpy.
As they slouch down the street, the two females and 4 males have a series of short exchanges which indicate to the audience that they've had a lot of drunken sex the night before, and that not all of them are too clear on what happened with whom.
We learn that the girls were told there would be three girls and three boys.
We also learn that one of the girls canceled, leaving the other two to 'date' on their own.
There was so much to be disturbed by in this film. When one of the girls goes into the bathroom of a park to puke, one of the guys who likes her follows her in.
The men ask each other about the women, sexually, when they're not around.
One of the last statements made is "If you get pregnant, I think it was me. I will handle the expense, so please call me if you are."
A very strange statement that I can't possibly judge from this side of the world.
"Woman of Golden Fish"
A very socially awkward 40 year old man named Sato is profiled. His life is boring and a little sad. He regularly frequents a brothel, and is a little bit in love with an escort he's been seeing for over 3 years.
The director convinces him to ask her on a date, and we follow their awkward trip to a fishing pond and a Karaoke room. We later discover that she's not the real escort, but an actress they got instead.
Sato is a frustrating character to me because my feelings for him are so complex. I want to be disgusted with him for frequenting escorts, for fetishizing his date by buying her a schoolgirl uniform. But he's so pathetic. His life was so dull it made me want to cry.
This film made me wonder about the differences between the Japanese and Canadian traditions/laws regarding prostitution. When I was in Osaka, I was told that there were no street prostitutes because they all worked indoors in an organized manner in gentlemen's clubs. Part of me wants to believe that Japan is 'worse' than here because prostitution is such a well-established, organized and accepted part of society, and another part of me wonders why most of the sex industry workers here are cowering on street corners.
"Fujica Single-Date"
A filmmaker learns that Fuji has stopped producing Super 8 film, and becomes nostalgic for the style and content of films he made as a younger man.
He is unhappily married with a young son. He decides to make more super 8 films before he loses the chance. His subject matter is a series of affairs that he either has or wants to have while his wife and son are away for the weekend. He sees the end of the stock of film and the absence of his wife as his 'last chance' to recapture the young, free, sexy life that he had when he first began using the film. He turns on the camera and begs it: "Make my dreams come true!"
We follow him through a series of encounters with women in their mid-twenties. I found it to be honest and disturbing at the same time. I think I understood what he was striving for with those real or imaginary encounters...freedom, randomness, playfulness, and impermanence. I hated him for being so detached from his family, and so 'adolescent' in his desires, but I respected his brutal honesty. I wondered what his son would think if he ever grew up and saw this film.