fetish Strictly speaking, this is a bumpy “cabbage”, in which to look for something other than homemade blanks, in-house humor and sewn on a livery, conditional connecting number. But that's strict. This comedy deserves not strict assessments, and even admiration, and even cultivarism in narrow circles, since it has both “thrash and harrow”, and a good, kind spirit of camaraderie, and the “elite smell” of an underground interrogator for the initiated.
Actually, there is only one theme here – Maiko. Not even a geisha, but maiko, if the analogue of a geisha is considered a mature woman as such, and, accordingly, maiko is a young girl. The main character Onizuka geisha is afraid, they are “aunts” for him, who knows what will come to their mind – they will be taken away and wrenched. And maiko is an embodied flowering, innocent femininity, already beautiful and still safe: you can admire, moan, come out with moe cheers and not even think – or rather, be afraid to think – about something more. The analogue of such a maicocon is the fetishization of schoolgirls in anime, as passionate and exaggeratedly platonic, where the sparkling panzu is the culmination of ecstasy, and hentai ... well, porn is found with geisha. Here it is - the mysteriously calm black eyes-pools, tiny alluring red sponges, feet in white socks, the gentle back of the neck with an arrow, a little posing, a little graceful dancing - and Onizuka wriggles in a frenzy. And seeing how his eternal nemesis Naito, in general, quite delicately, albeit in his own way, sticks his hand behind the kimono of his geisha-wife, he is on the verge of losing consciousness, and if you look at what achievements he is driven by this gesture, you can guess how much inner energy was released at that moment. Platonists are moving mountains.
I must say, Onizuka is generally a hyperactive person, and he is not a Platonist at all, if we take his normal hypostasis - he has a girlfriend, he is with "just women" without complexes and even a man, a male, an indisputable head and authority, but when it comes to geisha - everything, he is a timid, admiring schoolboy. This is a maikokon - once a schoolboy on an excursion he was "blinded by maiko" and received an imprinted psychological trauma for life. In principle, his life is going well: he works in a large fast-food ramen company in Tokyo, he has a loving beautiful girl, his colleague, but all this does not put him in. His delight is a site where he posts news from the world of geisha and exclusive photos taken by him on otaku trips, and where there is a forum to communicate with the same geishas. He chose the girl, too, because she is from Kyoto, he wants to hear the Kyoto dialect daily in a female version - a delight for his ears. In the end, he decides to move to the Kyoto branch of the company, even if it is very provincial-pathetic - only pads are made there under the covers of plastic cups with ramen. Most importantly, the branch is located in Kyoto, near the neighborhoods of geisha. Onizuka leaves her after learning that she is not from Kyoto, but from near Kyoto. All in all, he’s very logical within this big shift of his, and everything that’s going on around him throughout the film is consistent in its own way. The film could have been shot differently, in a more introverted manner, and then it would have been about psychological drama, about the depths of psychopathology, here all the madness is explicated and carnivalized, it is a cheerful pop-circus, variety madness, which nevertheless remains madness. It is especially acute when Onizuka and Naito express themselves in the company of geisha, sitting and waiting patiently and even a little dull, and Naito himself looks like a kind of phantom Other Onizuki, his idealized explicated hypostasis-goal, as pumped up by his own psychotic energy as everything that happens.
But still, this film is not about Onizuki’s mental illness, I repeat, it is about Maiko. Onizuki’s expressiveness is rather intended to intensify the “talk around maiko”, twist everything in the enchanting carnival of admiration and admiration. You could even see an advert for the geisha industry in the film if it wasn’t so parody, “fun” and at the same time somehow touching and friendly. You can really fall in love with the world of geisha by the end of the film, but then it is no longer advertising, but the art of advertising or even advertising art, just as, say, Dostoevsky’s novels advertise St. Petersburg. The film is self-sufficient, although it is really advertizing brightly abhorrent, noisy, attractive-attraction, it generally does not look like an application to the geisha industry, although sometimes it seems - so strong in it detailed centering on geisha-thematics. The roles of Tsutsumi Shinichi and Shibasaki Ko look a little dirty here, their duet is especially indicative, because they have several of these duets, almost in all styles: in the film alternative Sabu ("Drive), and in the drama hit mainstream (" Good luck!), and in the drama rather marginal niche thing (hurried to Galileo - "Victim of Suspect X"), and almost everywhere they are called a certain amusement, they are called here, according to their usual. It seems that both were invited in a purely friendly way, "to roast treshak" for company. If anyone here looks absolutely organic and “gives to full”, then, of course, this is Abe Sadao, this is his benefit, and if you look purely from the actor’s point of view, then the film is for him and about him. But again, after watching, there is a feeling not of the theater of one actor, but of an incredibly harmonious and well-coordinated acting ensemble, a talented friendly cabbage, which ended perfectly, with a zest saved for the last, dedicated to the same unforgettable geisha, and left behind a smile and a little maicocon inside.