Mototsugu Watanabe is a popular director of Pink Film. His film Dirty Mindfreaks (2013) won him both Best Director and Best Film at the Pink Film Award ceremony this year, which covered the year 2013, the same year that his Milk the Maid was released. He is known for a broadly comic, farcical style which he displays in such films as Ogenki Clinic (1988) and Whore Angels (2000). Milk the Maid has the same artificial and fantastical plotting and acting styles that I've seen in his other films. Yet after an hour's worth of sex and silliness, it concludes with an off-putting earnestness-- a maudlin attempt to tug the heart-strings, and to impart an uplifting message. Are we supposed to take this intentionally artificial story at face value, or is it intended to be ironic?
Milk the Maid opens with a tango between two disembodied hands, which hints at a more self-consciously artsy directorial style than is displayed in the rest of the film. There is some interesting use of flash-back towards the film's end. But otherwise, rather than indulging in the experimental filmmaking styles that are sometimes seen in the independent Pink Film genre, Watanabe is content to tell his humorous fable in a straight-forward manner. The obligatory Pink Film sex scenes are handled nicely, as tastelessly as one could hope for within the confines of soft-core, and they don't interfere with the plot. Indeed, they sometimes actually advance it.
Except for a bit of Chopin in a beach scene, a good deal of the soundtrack lends a Vaudevillian atmosphere to the film with silly sound effects: police whistles, train whistles, etc. The cartoonish over-acting that is on display in other Watanabe's films that I've seen is also present here. But either this signature performing style is slightly down-played in this film, or I'm just getting used to it. Lead actress Tia is very pretty but too artificial to my tastes. Besides a plastic, Barbie-doll physical presence, in the role of "baby angel" Milk the maid, she is just too cutesy-sweety saccharine. The storyline does provide her an excuse for behaving in a non-human manner, but still, too much of it gets on one's nerves. Ayum in the role of the gruff, equally exaggerated character Miki was more to my liking. But my favorite of the three leading ladies in the film was Mirei Yokoyama in the role of the wife/step-mother Ruriko. She brought enough reality and maturity to the role to give her character some relative emotional depth.
Grousing aside, watching this bubbly, comic little film was an enjoyable way to spend an hour. I have to admit that towards the end I did feel a little moved by the apparently sincere messages of self-sacrifice and devotion. However the cynic in me still couldn't shake the feeling that Watanabe was just pulling my leg...
