Annyong Yumika will be screening at the Walter Reade Theater on Wednesday June 30, at 5:45PM. The director, Tetsuaki Matsue will be in attendance. Head over the the NYAFF site for tickets and directions.
There are two strains of sadness running through director Tetsuaki Matsue's love song to a late friend: first is the obvious vacancy left in the lives of pornstar Yumika Hayashi's friends after her death at 35 in 2005. Colleagues and lovers wander in and out of the documentary (and some just hang around) reminiscing about the abrupt loss of a friend. The second, and I think most important bit of melancholy is that in spite of how many friends, lovers, and admirers she left behind, this prolific idol (she appeared in nearly 400 productions) left only a vague impression in her wake. She was seen and she was known but she was unknowable.
Consider the movie at the center of the documentary, a "lost" Yumika film from around 2000 called Junko: Story of a Tokyo Housewife, an adult video made by a Korean production company shot in Japan with many Korean principals struggling with Japanese. Through the course of his dissection of this movie - interviewing some of the cast and crew he's able to find and who are willing to talk on-camera about a porno shot almost ten years ago - Matsue learns that many of Yumika's closest confidantes didn't even know she was involved in the film or that it existed.
We see a lot of this movie throughout the course of the documentary - it's not very good and I would go so far as to say it's awful. Apparently the Korean's attempts at speaking Japanese are laughable, but I wouldn't know. It gets to a point where the threat of seeing one more minute of it incited a feeling of dread. "Oh no," I thought. "More awkward, ugly, heavily censored, and poorly-acted sex scenes." The director seems to get a kick out of it though, hoping to extrapolate more about the mysterious Yumika through what was surely a paycheck gig between paycheck gigs. It's an oddity more than anything else, and all we really glean from the cast and crew is that Yumika was a consummate professional who would occasionally allow the simulated sex scenes to become actual sex scenes without missing a beat.
More interesting are the interviews with her former lovers who also served as directors of her work. One talks about a working relationship that turned into an affair that became a road trip documentary (relived here in this documentary). Another confessed his love to her during a porn shoot and integrated it into the evocatively-named Hardball Penis. These areas of the actress' life are more interesting than Junko, and although Matsue spends quite a bit of time with some of Yumika's men one can't help but wish he'd done more. Interesting fact: at her funeral, all the men who carried the coffin were her boyfriends.
The documentary is cagey about the circumstances of her death. In fact, they're downright vague about them. We learn that one of her exes found her body when she was late showing up for a project they were discussing. Checking with Wikipedia it seems that the actual facts of her demise are unclear - another layer of mystery to Yumika, I suppose is that she died as she lived: as an enigma.
Charles is a freelance writer and game designer. Check out his blog, Monster In Your Veins.
There are two strains of sadness running through director Tetsuaki Matsue's love song to a late friend: first is the obvious vacancy left in the lives of pornstar Yumika Hayashi's friends after her death at 35 in 2005. Colleagues and lovers wander in and out of the documentary (and some just hang around) reminiscing about the abrupt loss of a friend. The second, and I think most important bit of melancholy is that in spite of how many friends, lovers, and admirers she left behind, this prolific idol (she appeared in nearly 400 productions) left only a vague impression in her wake. She was seen and she was known but she was unknowable.
Consider the movie at the center of the documentary, a "lost" Yumika film from around 2000 called Junko: Story of a Tokyo Housewife, an adult video made by a Korean production company shot in Japan with many Korean principals struggling with Japanese. Through the course of his dissection of this movie - interviewing some of the cast and crew he's able to find and who are willing to talk on-camera about a porno shot almost ten years ago - Matsue learns that many of Yumika's closest confidantes didn't even know she was involved in the film or that it existed.
We see a lot of this movie throughout the course of the documentary - it's not very good and I would go so far as to say it's awful. Apparently the Korean's attempts at speaking Japanese are laughable, but I wouldn't know. It gets to a point where the threat of seeing one more minute of it incited a feeling of dread. "Oh no," I thought. "More awkward, ugly, heavily censored, and poorly-acted sex scenes." The director seems to get a kick out of it though, hoping to extrapolate more about the mysterious Yumika through what was surely a paycheck gig between paycheck gigs. It's an oddity more than anything else, and all we really glean from the cast and crew is that Yumika was a consummate professional who would occasionally allow the simulated sex scenes to become actual sex scenes without missing a beat.
More interesting are the interviews with her former lovers who also served as directors of her work. One talks about a working relationship that turned into an affair that became a road trip documentary (relived here in this documentary). Another confessed his love to her during a porn shoot and integrated it into the evocatively-named Hardball Penis. These areas of the actress' life are more interesting than Junko, and although Matsue spends quite a bit of time with some of Yumika's men one can't help but wish he'd done more. Interesting fact: at her funeral, all the men who carried the coffin were her boyfriends.
The documentary is cagey about the circumstances of her death. In fact, they're downright vague about them. We learn that one of her exes found her body when she was late showing up for a project they were discussing. Checking with Wikipedia it seems that the actual facts of her demise are unclear - another layer of mystery to Yumika, I suppose is that she died as she lived: as an enigma.
Charles is a freelance writer and game designer. Check out his blog, Monster In Your Veins.
Thanks for the review, this doc sounds interesting.
One point - when the Japanese media or Japanese Wikipedia are vague about how someone died, it is sometimes (no idea about this specific case) because the person decided to exit the planet on their own. If you look into the deaths of Japanese artists like Nagi Noda or Tetsuya Ishida, there are many rumors floating around - but, in general, Japanese websites will not report anything about it. It's respectful, but makes it hard to know out the truth about these creative people.
Again, I have no idea about how the person in this film died, just an observation on Japanese culture.
I'm intrigued about this one, but not sure if it is worth going to see, as I'd have to fit it in to a schedule that is already up in the air.
What I gleam from your review, Charles, is pretty much what you feel, in addition to Treeing's comments on how respect plays a role in a Japanese person's death, and even their life. In some way, it almost feels like the words 'Japanese' and 'documentary' don't go together because they can been deemed cagey.