Fantastic Fest 2009

This year a Japanese film called DEPARTURES won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film. Its director Yojiro Takita, is a veteran of the Japanese film industry who started at the bottom and is now a very hot property. When we say he started at the bottom, we really mean it. For Mr. Yojiro Takita got his start making Pink Films, the peculiarly Japanese formulation of sex, sadism, and anything-goes initiative that thrills salarymen in back-alley adult theaters. To be fair, he was good at what he did, and his GROPER TRAIN titles are among the best and most subversive pink films ever made. And he's in good company - Masayuki Suo (SHALL WE DANCE) and Kyoshi Kurosawa (TOKYO SONATA) also got their start in pinku eiga. In GROPER TRAIN: WEDDING CAPRICCIO, part of a popular series: a wealthy politician, dying of cancer hires a detective to find his estranged daughter. It transpires that the tycoon's daughter is happily married, and her daft brother, who wears a napoleonic hat everywhere, is involved in a scheme to get the old man's money. When the daughter turns up kidnapped and the son meets a sticky end, the detective must rely on the oddest clues to put the pieces together. If it sounds convoluted - oh lord, it is. And we haven't even mentioned the numerous sex scenes, many aboard a passenger train as stoic Japanese commuters, who aren't in on the joke, pretend not to notice. Somehow Takita pulls it off, with great comic moments and some legitimately sexy content. It's not exactly Lubitsch but you can see Takita's touch taking shape already.