Aimai AKA Ambiguous (2003) - Toshiya Ueno-Erotica Films

20/08/18

Aimai AKA Ambiguous (2003) - Toshiya Ueno

Synopsis:

Five suicidal people meet on the internet and form a 'suicide group'. They all have reasons for which they want to terminate their lives. They arrange to meet at one of the member's homes to spend their last hours together.
Based loosely on an actual account that took place in Japan. Life, sex and redemption.

It was chosen as Best Film of the year at the Pink Grand Prix ceremony.

Review:
A battered wife (Murayama), a hardcore porn actress (Sasaki), an ostracized high school student (Aoyama), a rather morose waiter at a curry rice restaurant and a dispirited maker of hanko (the stamp the Japanese use to sign their names) are brought together via the internet. With the AV actress recurrently subjected to the violent sadistic sexual demands of her one-man production team and the hanko maker (Ebata) increasingly dispirited by the war raging in Iraq, all five pledge to commit mass suicide by inhaling gas. Despite their feelings of disconnection with the rest of society, when they finally come together in person the couples within the group begin to form more intimate physical connections with each other as the final hour approaches.

Rather morbid subject matter and an uncharacteristically sullen approach given its intended market, Ueno's film is nevertheless in some ways quite typical of the stance taken by its production company, Kokuei, that pink films are, first and foremost, films. As long as enough sex scenes are present, it is up to the director to choose in which context they are presented. It is an approach that sometimes infuriates regular sex film patrons and unfortunately goes all but ignored by mainstream film critics, but nevertheless attracts its own unique group of adherents. Waisetsu Netto Shûdan swept the board as the best work of its year at the 16th Annual Pink Awards organized by pink film specialist magazine PG.

It also stands as one of the most genuinely insightful and of-the-moment films produced within the Japanese independent sector in its year. Just as in the early days of Koji Wakamatsu's most political work in the 60s, the fast production times and complete independence from the mainstream industry allow the pink film to remain uniquely contemporary and on the pulse. Thus, outside of the obligatory sex scenes, Ueno's film actually has something of note to say about the state of the national psyche and interpersonal relations within it - including an amusing mobile phone gag. It is also worth noting that the spiritual malaise to which the central characters succumb and their disgust with the world of which they are part is explicitly invoked though TV footage of President Bush's proclamation of war. The same device was also used over ten years before during Bush number one's Gulf War, in Takahisa Zeze's No Man's Land (Waisetsu Bôsô Shûdan Kedemono, 1991), also produced by Kokuei.

-- Jasper Sharp (midnighteye.com).