S&M Hunter (Officially released January 14, but apparently doing a slow roll-out over the winter and spring)

Anyway, speaking of fetishism…

Pink Eiga, a new label dedicated to bringing the best of its namesake genre to non-Japanese audiences, appears to be off to a smashing start. S&M Hunter, one of its first releases, is supposedly a classic of its kind. Strangely, and against my expectations, after viewing it, I’d have to agree. It’s certainly a classic of some sort. And if you’re somehow even less familiar than I about the genre in question, “pink films” are the sex-oriented films from Japan that have been a thriving industry and even a training ground for mainstream filmmakers for decades. The latter makes sense not because Japanese cinema is so fraught with sex, but because the production limitations imposed by pink films provide effective vehicles to hone craft and master one's storytelling abilities.The films are brief in terms of running time, must be shot quite quickly to stay within budget, and yet somehow must look as least as professional as V-cinema.

And, just to be crystal clear, these aren’t porn, not by the criteria that we apply in the West, particularly in the U.S. Instead, pink films range from straightforward erotica to works that tackle sexuality in the manner of transgressive cinema the world over, by both spoofing and splicing other genres, testing their audiences, and doing things that big budget films wouldn’t dare to. Of course there’s a softcore aesthetic to them, but the good ones, as I discovered with New Tokyo Decadence - The Slave, deal with sex with the same frankness that other films deal with different subject matter: as a valid part of human activity to be addressed in art, not a dirty subject to be shunned (despite how dirty some of the actual sex might be).

So for these reasons, especially the spoofing/splicing aspect, it’s easy to see why S&M Hunter is so well regarded—although again I’m not sufficiently knowledgeable to say whether it’s a minor or major classic. The title character, who appears here in the second installment of a trilogy, is kind of like an Indiana Jones of bondage, wielding ropes rather than a whip, and doing so with absurd panache. (A better analogy might be made to HK’s “flying guillotine” martial arts movies that fetishisize weapons.) With a vaguely Nietzschean rationale at work, he feels that women need to be “trained.” And while such a premise may sound hopelessly misogynistic on some level (or many levels), the self-mockery quotient is high throughout (think the women-taming scene in Fellini’s 8 ½) and the story takes pains to identify all the subs as consenting or “deserving” of such treatment because they’re the “bad guys.” Finally, it’s worth pointing out that ultimately it’s sexual pleasure that’s administered, not pain per se for the sadist’s enjoyment, the message being that all women harbor a crypto-submissive who requires the guidance of a sexual sensei in order to emerge from hiding. Not that the film needs an apologist—like all trangsressive cinema, it would probably bristle at the notion.

Also, is should be noted that the film’s domination content is "equal opportunity" in many ways: the central plot has S&M Hunter leading a rescue operation to free a male sexual slave from the clutches of evil female kidnappers. His client happens to the slave’s boyfriend. Yes, that’s right, the sexual lines get complicated here, with the result that the audience ends up questioning all such preconceived boundaries and definitions to some extent. Even basic notions of intimacy, attraction, and pleasure get turned on their heads. This occurs most dramatically when our anti-hero encounters his nemesis, and she maims him permanently—undaunted, he doesn’t seek to exact a comparable punishment, but is content to finally “discipline” her just as he has all the others (although on a larger scale), coming across as a  bizarre sexual saint in the process. But in messing with audience expectations and giving us sex where we expect violence (and vice versa), we’re treated to the spectacle of the Pleasure Principle run amok, so that the will power of all involved evaporates in the face of transcendent ecstasy or the need to provoke it. Even our hero doesn’t seem to be enjoying his line of work much, instead performing it with stoic detachment. Given to speaking in aphorisms simultaneously ridiculous and thought-provoking (“Desire grows into sin, sin ripens to death”), he embodies a uniquely Buddhist/Asian approach to desire and therefore, in this context, a uniquely paradoxical one as well.