<html><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; ">Greetings,<div><br><div>I wonder if anyone in or around Tokyo might have been at the recent screenings at Eurospace (mid-February), where Nikkatsu's new "line" of <span class="Apple-style-span" style="text-decoration: underline;">roman</span> <span class="Apple-style-span" style="text-decoration: underline;">poruno</span> films was debuted in mid-February.</div><div><br></div><div>The various articles & websites I have seen are going out of their way to suggest that the first film, <span class="Apple-style-span" style="text-decoration: underline;">Ato kara, mae kara</span>, is not a remake of the first r<span class="Apple-style-span" style="text-decoration: underline;">oman poruno</span> film, but rather a "return." Despite this brashness, the PR does frame the film as a neo-nostalgia picture by name-checking that first film,<span class="Apple-style-span" style="text-decoration: underline;"> Danchi tzuma--hiru sagari no jiō</span> (1971, dir. Nishimura Shogorō). (Website here: <a href="http://www.roman-returns.com/roman.html)">http://www.roman-returns.com/roman.html)</a>.</div><div><br></div><div>I was kind of curious about the reception of this film, if anyone happened to catch the various talk shows. The venue is "classier" than typical pink territory, and often features foreign films frequented mainly my women. But (if I recall correctly...) new pink films of the more auteurist variety have also played at Eurospace. The director, Masamoto Shūichirō, seems of a more thoroughly corporate stripe than the pink directors, with roots in Yoshimoto Kōgyō. Also, the sports papers seem to think the new line is going for a split male-female audience (danjō o towazu), a marketing mix it seems to find necessary to capture the "eros of the 21st century."</div><div><br></div><div>I was curious what the whole vibe of the screenings was like, and if the bourgeois love-hate nostalgia object of the "danchi" setting has any resemblance to the split purveyed by a show like <span class="Apple-style-span" style="text-decoration: underline;">Mad Men</span> for a viewer in the US-- a combination of historical hindsight that promotes a moral high ground of "how far we are from those retrograde moralities" (water-cooler inequities, racism, Kennedy assassination all happening in the background, while the corporate-suburbia commuter cadre is oblivious) while also supporting a retro love of period costumes and furniture fetishes.</div><div><br></div><div>Anne</div></div></body></html>