Love & Pop

[Mark Schilling]

Thanks to Julien Seveon for recommending my book -- even if he didn't like
my review of "Love & Pop"! I have no intention of defending the latter --
it speaks for itself. I did find curious, though, Julien's statement that
Anno had "absolutely no reaction or criticis(m) about this 'new' form of
commerce'." Anno, in fact, takes a savagely satiric view of the men who buy
the girls' services -- most are little more mangaesque grotesques. 

One complaint I have heard from Japanese who have seen the film is its
"lack of realism" -- meaning, I suppose, that the men who indulge in enjo
kosai are actually more "normal" than Anno makes them out to be. But Anno
is less interested in presenting a representative sample of enjo kosai
customers than in probing the sickness of a society in which such a
phenomenon can flourish. 

Unlike Harada, who has internalized Hollywood styles of storytelling --
with their linear narratives and their tendency to editorialize -- Anno
comes from the world of SF manga and anime, which takes its models more
from domestic sources and is consequently less influenced by Western
narrative logic or inhibited by Western moral conventions (PC or
otherwise). So his work will, I suppose, seem less "committed" to those
used to the cinematic conventions of the West, in which a film that
addresses a controversial social issue is expected to take a black and
white view of its protagonists, with the director always on the side of the
victimized angels. 

Anno does takes the side of his ko gals, but he also satirizes their
materialism, their amorality and their objectification by everyone from
their customers to the mass media (the up-the-skirt camera angles parody
the voyeuristic "panchira" photo magazines). His stance is thus ambiguous
(as was Mizoguchi's toward his heroines) -- but his film, I think, offers a
richer, truer view of Heisei Japan, in all its dynamism and degeneracy,
than Harada's, which for all its merits is as "outside" its subject as "Mr.
Baseball."

Mark Schilling
<schill at gol.com>