Erotic Diary of an Office Lady — dvd movie review
As mentioned in our Dreamlogic update, we’ve received three of Kinos’s recent Nikkatsu titles for review. I figured, why not start with the most provocatively titled one first? So, Erotic Diary of an Office Lady it is.
Again, this being the first film we’ve reviewed belonging to the “Roman Porno/Pinku” genre we’ve actually reviewed, an introduction is in order. The television vs. film battle over audience dollars that played out in the US (taught in nearly every film class) also saw a similar counterpart in Japan. Attempting to entice theater audiences in the face of falling ticket sales, film companies decided to make films featuring material you couldn’t see on television. And of these there were two main camps, Toei’s Pinky Violence (we’ve reviewed a number of these), a ribald mixture of girl gangs, sex, violence, swordplay and comedy; and Nikkatsu’s “Roman Porno”, a shortening of “romantic pornography”, which were artsy erotic films that could be enjoyed by both sexes (read: date movies. You’ll want to read up on both genres on the wiki page here, as it does a far better job at explaining than I can do in two paragraphs.)
The criteria for the roman pornos was simple. Directors (top notch, accomplished ones, I might add) needed to make sure the films they made were in the can in two weeks, completed within budget, and featured a number of audience pleasing sequences within a runtime of less than 80 minutes. Note that due to Japanese censorship standards, no genitals or pubic hair could be shown in said sequences, so directors were to come up with artistic and suggestive ways of depicting and hinting at various acts. Other than that, directors were free to exercise whatever artistic, political, or social agenda they may have had. As such, you had strange meditations on the effects of media in the daily lives of citizens, impassioned diatribes railing against perceived injustices of the Catholic Church, philosophical films, fetish films, comedies, and much much more. Suffice it to say, this setup, with master directors and cinematographers exercising free reign within exploitation boundaries, resulted in a strange and beautiful mash-up of art, trash, and social commentary the likes that have yet to be replicated outside of Japan.
Masaru Komina’s (Tatoooed Flower Vase, Cloistered Nun: Runa’s Confession ) 1977 film, Erotic Diary of an Office Lady, sees Asami Suzumura (Asami Ogawa, in her first film), a nondescript office clerk trapped in a life of endless tedium, and her journey toward self awakening, love, and self reliance. Of course, being an erotic film, this journey sees more than its fair share of sexual encounters, from Asami’s first act of accidental voyeurism (an office tryst, depicted on the DVD cover), to her eventual affair with her boss, to her ultimate discovery of love and acceptance, all handled in an exceedingly tasteful manner. It’s worth noting that Erotic Diary is the seventh film in the (at the time) very popular Office Lady series, and marked the start of a lengthy career for its star actress, and another hit for its accomplished director.
Erotic Diary of an Office Lady may not be a particularly deep film, but there’s far more going on under the surface than one might think could be found, given their preconceptions of erotic film. There are multiple threads concerning struggle against predetermined fates, morale-sapping routine, and other oppressive obligations. Asami herself is an office drone, slaving away at her Japanese typewriter (these things are amazing. Huge cylinders with Kanji characters, and a pull lever for placing the actual character on the page) the entire work day. Rather than going home to relax, she returns to take care of her elderly father, who makes sure to reiterate to Asami her need to marry (and eventually arranges a marriage to a total dweeb, albeit a respectable high society one). Her coworker, the office slut, reminds Asami of the relentlessness of time, remaking that her days of sexual inhibition will soon be over, as she herself will be exiting her twenties in a matter of days. And then there are the chicks, those adorable baby birds, whose brief lives are made all the more sad and pathetic by their fragility and captivity.
Masaru Konuma’s direction, combined with Nobumasa Mizuno’s impeccable cinematography, make Erotic Diary of an Office Lady quite the visually arresting tale. And no, this is not because of simple juvenile titillation (heck, most of the characters aren’t much to look at). There’s an undeniable artistry at work in every scene. Every shot is framed in a manner best conveying the mood, emotion, or state of the characters and narrative. Scenes of eroticism take on a certain poetry in their ability to portray an arousing image at the same time conveying an emotional message. Case in point: when Asami finally makes love with the lowly bird-keeper, the man she loves, their fumbling releases the caged chicks, who then spill out across the floor, filling the scene with an amassment of bobbing, yellow, chirping, feathery puffballs — freedom is found only through being true to one’s own heart. And these sequences, as mentioned before, have their sexual mechanics tastefully obscured by strategically placed objects, at one heightening the style while saving us from the absurdity of the real act. My only complaint is that these scenes, as nicely composed as they are, drag on a little long.
In the interest of preventing this review from becoming similarly lengthy, I’ll bring it to a close here. Erotic Diary of an Office Lady is definitely a niche film, but if you’re at all interested in what a genuine thoughtful and artistic eroticism looks like, this film provides a nice reference. True eroticism may be a dead art, killed by the plethora of on-demand internet gratification and in your face MTV edits, but at least this and other films of Masaru Konuma can give you an idea of what erotic film-art could be.
The DVD
Kino’s release of Erotic Diary of an Office Lady is pretty decent. The video itself is quite nice, a full restoration of the film, presented in its original 2.35:1 aspect ratio. Sound is equally clear, maintaining the original Japanese language mono track, but still managing to rock the film’s awesomely funky tunes.
In the extras department Kino’s DVD of Erotic Diary of an Office Lady is a fairly bare bones affair. There’s a trailer for the film (Translated, nice.) and a bio for the film’s director, Masaru Konuma. If this is your first time watching one of these films, I’d recommend reading the bio first.
One final strange bit is that the Office Lady on the DVDs cover is not Asami, the main character in the film. Granted, this may have been made as a decision to sell more DVDs, as the main character is something of a plain Jane, but it nevertheless proved a bit disorienting during the beginning of the film.
In the end, the Kino disc is light on fluff, but high on quality. I’d recommend Erotic Diary of an Office Lady to existing fans of “roman porno” and those simply looking for something different.
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