It starts as a really dark movie about two people at their lowest moment, but gradually it becomes sweeter. Somai was crafting this like his second film Sailor Suit entirely with long takes, making it more theater driven. His style is just riveting no matter what. The movie is totally unpredictable. You have no idea where it goes next. The bold eroticism, in a mainstream film, it is pretty much unprecedented. One of my measures of a director is how they tackle eroticism because it reveals, basically, their quality how they relate to the audience. Is it taboo. Shameful. Idealized. Shy. Repressed. Religious.
I think here is a brutal raw truth. Especially for 1985. It is done so well that I am basically taking for granted the heights this film achieves. You are experiencing the characters so intimately, that you are seeing psychologies bare on screen without limit. By the time it ends I feel like, this is the purpose of art. It is voyeuristic. It puts you in peoples heads you would never experience. You miss them when it is done.
It is all in that line he says to her at the start, "You women have it easy." Then the film proceeds to show this woman having it hellishly bad. Not only that, but the other women she encounters too.
When they re-enact the big moment. The movie has done a trick by making its introduction so shocking, it becomes a traumatic memory for we the audience. It does not resonate that these two characters are the same ones, because they have changed so much across the running time. Because when the film began we had no idea.
So we come full circle, and it is a show stopper, since now we know they were decent people. Trauma, eroticism, enlightenment. Cinema was meant for it, but few have the courage to go there.
