Scoutman (2000) - Masato Ishioka-Erotica Films

04/02/13

Scoutman (2000) - Masato Ishioka

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."
The time was well-spent -- "Pain" may not have the most descriptive of titles (it was once called, more appropriately, "Scout Man"), but it is clear-eyed about its subjects and their milieu. Most films about Japan's enormous sex industry either romanticize or sensationalize it. "Pain" opts instead for a documentary approach -- many of the actors are AV professionals and much of the dialogue sounds improvised -- but is more interested in moral dilemmas than social issues, while following a carefully plotted dramatic arc.
The sex trade, we come to see, can be as dulling and deadening as any other that sells souls for cash. Its workers are less victims and victimizers than human beings who have made certain choices and find themselves changed as a result. They become sharper in some ways, harder in others: They can see, but no longer feel, lust but no longer love.

The film's central characters are a young couple who have escaped from a suburban nowhere -- and their parents' opposition to their marriage -- to the big city. Mari (Miku Matsumoto), 17, and Atsushi (Hideo Nakaizumi), 20, have no money, no contacts, no prospects. Mari, who has the face of a cherub and limps, industriously calls potential employers -- and comes up empty-handed. Then she meets Kana (Yuka Fujimoto), a tall, stolid girl who is hawking party tickets to passersby. Kana initiates Mari into the game -- one of many, it turn out -- and she earns her first yen since coming to Tokyo.
Cruising the streets, Atsushi encounters Miki (Yuri Komuro), an off-duty AV actress who takes him to a love hotel -- perhaps to kill time till her next job. Through her, he is introduced to the world of scout men, one of whom, the ruggedly handsome, perpetually hustling Yoshiya (Akihito Yoshie), takes him under his wing. Yoshiya's boss is Sugishita (Shiro Shimomoto), who has a smooth line of patter and an insatiable appetite for fresh young meat. He takes a liking to Atsushi, seeing this innocent-looking but lynx-eyed kid as a natural. He is a good judge of character.

The story is about the making of two professionals -- one willing, one not. Atsushi takes to his new job like a duck to dirty water. The trick, his mentors tell him, is not to seduce his marks, but put a business proposition to them as simply, and as attractively, as possible.