This is an intense, romantic, deeply human, dramatic, realistic and surprising film about the japanese AV industry, and about the feelings of a very young couple.
[Source: Japan times]
“You oughta be in show business, baby!” That’s been a pickup line of “producers” since the days of D.W. Griffith, though in Japan today the pick-up artists are likely to be young men with stylishly coiffed, tea-colored hair, tanned pretty-boy faces and dressed in dark designer mufti. They prowl places like Shibuya, Harajuku and Ikebukuro, hitting on one woman after another with a coaxing, teasing, wheedling urgency.
The men are usually selling, not themselves, but an arubaito in the AV industry, with “AV” standing for “audiovisual,” but meaning porn. Called “scout men,” they are the subject of “Pain,” an excellent new film by Masato Ishioka, a veteran porn director himself, who spent two years researching his subjects. Though weathering serial rejections that would wither the average male ego to the size of a quark, the scout men at first shied away from Ishioka. “They didn’t take me seriously,” he told me after a screening. “It took a long time to win their confidence.”Read More »
