Black Swan Erotic drama Hisayasu Sato is not just a sketch about the life of porn actresses and the general way of their search by the creators of such a video business, but also a wonderful story about love and friendship, where the notes of comedy are combined side by side with disturbing and creepy episodes. The main character is a shy twenty-two-year-old girl, the submissive daughter of a domineering and demanding mother, once comes across the tenacious tricks of a stranger who offers to change his life and his personality. He invites her to star in pornographic pictures, and suddenly agreeing, the heroine becomes an anime otaku in a blue wig named Lulu.
Paintings brought to the acid absurdity of the flower play surrealism and realistic drama in a very close adhesion, not really falling from one to another, and not focusing on either the urban fairy tale or life difficulties, but presenting everything under the sauce of very different moods. Corporate Japanese modesty is replaced by an equally distinctive Japanese scale, joy contrasts with grief, and humor with atrocities. The film, like the main character, reveals its splendor slowly and gradually, looking initially almost a modest documentary craft of an amateur character, but increasingly acquiring artistic value and interesting plot moves within the narrative, ending with a real emotional explosion, without which in principle it would be better even to do at all.
Asian art house, and not only he, can not keep the proper sense of proportion in the story shown, not catching the climax and the note on which to end the film. At the end, the action of the picture is “embellished” with rich Asian massacres, blackness and interspersed surrealism in an already very specific visual range, and even the notion of a good ending here is very far from the traditional Hollywood views on happy ending. To complete such a film was a protracted scene on the beach, but the action inexorably poured further into a tasteless thrash epilogue, cutting a pseudo-drama from patchwork scattered as the plot.
In fact, this film turned out to be an Asian version of Aronofsky’s Black Swan, with an incredible abundance of parallels, only the ballet here was replaced by the porn industry, in which the heroine has a lesbian girlfriend, and a bright competitor with a characteristic elimination, and a charismatic mentor, and of course the entire culmination of the drama is shown in the final solemn performance – in this case, in a video of a gang rape. The conflict between mother and daughter is completely slime under the blueprint, but it turned out to be much more pronounced in the dialogues of its apogee. Where Aronofsky had the modesty and obscurity of the narrative, boldness and frankness gave way. The film became much more expressive visually, retaining almost all the same characters and images, only with the action in Japan and, accordingly, Asian casting.
The split personality of the main character, unable to distinguish, where reality is, where she is an anime wizard, where she is a black swan, and where a lesbian in love is shown in all the amazing subtleties of feeling oneself in society, psychological adaptation to the environment and personal isolation in one’s own, safe and fictional world. And when reality is cold like ice, you can always take a magic wand, a wig, a school uniform and change into Lula, hiding your deepest feelings and problems behind a smile.
The surrounding world then freezes around the heroine, then actively rushes, trying to absorb her. With such a duality of the nature of events, other pronounced plot contrasts play even stronger. The picture captivates and captures, immerses in the very essence and does not let go to the end, adding as a result a fair share of powerful tension. All the hanging guns shoot sooner or later, all the prerequisites lead to a violent reaction, and each catalyst thoroughly influences events, helping them to reach their climax.
A beautiful story, a little spoiled by a long and unnecessary epilogue, nevertheless not spoiled everything to the ground. Despite the drama and the notes of tension that exist in some places, it looks very easy, fun and charges with a good mood. Liberated and revealed by the middle of its action, such a movie leaves a lot of strong impressions, besides it turned out to be extremely successful.
7 out of 10
Original