Is this the pinnacle of Japanese pink cinema? | Little White Lies

Home Ents

Is this the pin­na­cle of Japan­ese pink cinema?

16 Mar 2020

Words by Anton Bitel

Black and white image of a close-up facial feature, likely a mouth or eyes, with blurred and distorted shapes.
Black and white image of a close-up facial feature, likely a mouth or eyes, with blurred and distorted shapes.
Atsushi Yamatoya’s 1967 Inflat­able Sex Doll of the Waste­land sub­verts expec­ta­tions of this soft­core genre.

Atsushi Yam­a­toya pre­vi­ous­ly co-direct­ed the pink film Sea­son of Betray­al with Koji Waka­mat­su, but his first fea­ture as solo direc­tor, orig­i­nal­ly released under the title Kyō­fu Ningyō (or Hor­ror Doll), was quick­ly renamed Kôya no Dac­chi wai­fu, trans­lat­ed as Inflat­able Sex Doll of the Waste­land, Dutch Wife in the Desert or any num­ber of minor variants.

This is an enig­mat­ic and para­dox­i­cal title, per­haps cap­tur­ing some­thing of the film’s hybrid, even con­tra­dic­to­ry nature. For while the ref­er­ence to a sex doll in the title’s first half seems to be adver­tis­ing pre­cise­ly the sort of objec­ti­fy­ing tit­il­la­tion that the audi­ence for a pink film might rea­son­ably be expect­ing, the sec­ond half promis­es some­thing more arid, exis­ten­tial and alienating.

In fact, though pep­pered with scenes of (most­ly rough) sex, and with female and male nudi­ty that – in accor­dance with Japan­ese con­ven­tion – excludes any depic­tion of repro­duc­tive organs, Inflat­able Sex Doll of the Waste­land opens in a waste­land, first shot wide from a high angle, where a taxi drops off Sho (Yuichi Mina­to) so that he can meet the estate agent Naka (Sei­gi Noga­mi) and demon­strate his prowess with guns.

Six months ear­li­er, some rape-hap­py thugs had kid­napped Naka’s girl­friend Sae (Noriko Tat­su­mi, the first queen” of pink film), and they con­tin­ue to taunt him with film reels and phone calls of their abuse. So now Naka hires the sharp-shoot­ing Sho to kill the abduc­tors and get Sae back.

Mean­while, Sho is haunt­ed by the mem­o­ry of his own girl­friend Rie (Mari Nagise), raped and mur­dered five years ago by his for­mer bud­dy” Ko (Shohei Yamamo­to). He plans to take out the gang of kid­nap­pers while at last wreak­ing simul­ta­ne­ous revenge on knife-wield­ing neme­sis Ko. Yet in a town full of show-room dum­mies, sex dolls and hon­ey traps, where arti­fice and per­fidy are every­where, is Sho’s ram­page of vengeance real, or just a ram­pant male fantasy?

I can’t see any­thing,” Sho com­plains of the film that Naka shows him of Sao being raped by her cap­tors. That film, depict­ing (but only bare­ly depict­ing) sex in the most soft­core of fash­ions, is a mise en abyme of the pink film that we are watch­ing. And Sho’s com­plaint about the dif­fi­cul­ty of see­ing any of the action’ clear­ly reflects upon the kind of cen­sor­ship that was stan­dard­ly applied to such films in Japan.

Our own view­ing of this film is com­pli­cat­ed by its inter­nal view­ers. For not only is Naka show­ing Sho the film as evi­dence of a crime rather than as a stag reel, but Naka is also vis­i­bly present in the film, tied to a chair and forced by the gang to watch what they are doing to his girl­friend. They kept play­ing with her in front of me and record­ed every­thing,” he says, dis­traught, by way of expla­na­tion to Sho, I’ve played the film hun­dreds of times so maybe it’s all scratched.”

This admis­sion comes with an awk­ward ambi­gu­i­ty as to whether Naka’s voyeuris­tic obses­sion with the film is mere pruri­ence (like the viewer’s), or a more gen­uine con­cern for Sae. Fur­ther mod­u­lat­ing and dis­com­fit­ing our own view­er­ship is the pres­ence, behind Naka and Sho, of Sae’s own father, who is all at once trau­ma­tised, med­icat­ed par­ent and dirty old man, chuck­ling creep­i­ly as the film goes on and tak­ing bizarre solace for his daughter’s absence in, of all things, a singing sex doll.

All this serves to place the more porno­graph­ic ele­ments of Yamatoya’s fea­ture in a con­text that makes their sex­i­ness’ as prob­lem­at­ic for the view­er as pos­si­ble. Con­verse­ly the film’s vengeance plot and vio­lent gun­play is con­stant­ly sex­u­alised, with Sho’s .38 Cal­i­bre revolvers and dum­dum’ bul­lets express­ly invest­ed with phallic/​erotic asso­ci­a­tions dur­ing his long scene in a hotel room with the pros­ti­tute Mina (Miki Watari).

Here the dri­ves to fuck and to kill are shown to be two sides of the same coin. Sex and vio­lence always sell in the cin­e­ma, of course, but their cou­pling is sel­dom pre­sent­ed with such uneasy intro­spec­tion as a brand of express­ly delud­ed male wish fulfilment.

You been sleep­ing?”, Naka had asked Sho ear­li­er. Wake up, open your eyes,” Sho will say the uncon­scious Rie, lying as limp and life­less as a doll. I’ve dreamed this day for five years,” Sho informs Ku in their final show­down. Indeed there is an oneir­ic qual­i­ty to Inflat­able Sex Doll of the Waste­land, as the revenge sce­nario of its sec­ond half plays out with all the irra­tional­i­ty of a dream.

By the end, these echo­ing events, blur­ring iden­ti­ties and loop­ing tra­jec­to­ries are exposed as errant mas­cu­line dri­ves caught in an end­less cir­cu­lar­i­ty, and we can at last see the wood for the trees. It should come as no sur­prise that Yam­a­toya, direct­ing from his own script here, had pre­vi­ous­ly helped write Sei­jun Suzuki’s sim­i­lar­ly sur­re­al and abstract take on hit­men, Brand­ed to Kill, a film which Yam­a­toya would him­self lat­er extrav­a­gant­ly reimag­ine in pink as Trapped in Lust.

Jazz pianist Yosuke Yamashita’s dis­cor­dant score and edi­tor Shogo Sakurai’s wild leaps between dif­fer­ent times and real­i­ties all add to the dis­ori­ent­ing impact of a filmic world where every­thing is off kil­ter and night­mar­ish, and where a hero’s vio­lent ram­page is less a direct pur­suit of jus­tice than a short-lived attempt to escape his own fail­ure and impotence.

Time to wake up.” Sho says near the end of Inflat­able Sex Doll of the Waste­land, lit­tle real­is­ing, until it is too late, that he him­self is mere­ly day­dream­ing his way through an ego trip dec­o­rat­ed with the show­room dum­mies of his frag­ment­ing imag­i­na­tion. As such, this is a film that con­stant­ly decon­structs its own fur­nish­ings, reveal­ing the out­er lim­its of Japan’s pink cinema.

Inflat­able Sex Doll of the Waste­land, remas­tered in 4K from the last remain­ing 35mm pos­i­tive print, is released along­side Masao Adachi and Haruhiko Arai’s Gush­ing Prayer as part of Third Win­dow Film’s Pink Films Vol 1 & 2 on Dual-For­mat DVD and Blu-ray, 16 March.

You might like