Glamorous Life Of Sachiko Hanai

The Glamorous Life of Sachiko Hanai is an imaginative erotic adventure mixes a discussion of dialectical materialism, Latin phrases like “Deus ex Machina� and “Cogito Ergo Sum,� and the famous file footage of the toppling of the statue of Saddam Hussein

[Entertainment: Film]

Summ: While its title makes no sense, The Glamorous Life of Sachiko Hanai is an imaginative erotic adventure mixes a discussion of dialectical materialism, Latin phrases like “Deus ex Machina� and “Cogito Ergo Sum,� and the famous file footage of the toppling of the statue of Saddam Hussein in with some rather raunchy behavior of George Bush that will really generate a little shock and awe.

 

Sachiko Hanai (Emi Kuroda) is a kinky call girl at a Tokyo imekura, a brothel which caters to customers with a fetish for teacher-student role play. However, the happy hooker’s life is irreversible altered, by chance, the day she accidentally stumbles upon a rendezvous gone bad between North Korean and Arab secret agents which turns into a shootout.

After taking a stray bullet to the forehead, Sachiko doesn’t die but is somehow magically transformed into a savant capable of solving complex mathematical formulas, speaking several foreign languages, and conversing about the works of great thinkers from Noam Chomsky to Susan Sontag. In fact, the lustful geisha girl soon discovers that she even climaxes when discussing such sophisticated fare with her favorite clients.

More importantly, however, Sachiko has somehow ended-up in possession of the fingerprint of George Bush, which makes her capable of kickstarting a nuclear Armageddon. With spies in hot pursuit, and the future of mankind in her horny hands, the question becomes, “How will this sudden genius handle her awesome responsibility?�

This is the clever enough premise upon which The Glamorous Life of Sachiko Hanai rests. The film is the latest in a new genre of fairly sexually-explicit flicks, ala the equally-shocking Shortbus and Exterminating Angels. While there was a time when these movies would have been summarily dismissed as soft pornography, it appears that more and more of them are making their way into legit theaters willing to exhibit features with fairly graphic depictions of human sexuality.

Perhaps this is a sign that Puritanical Hollywood might be moving away from its violence-oriented ratings system which would censor a scene of a man caressing a woman’s bosom, but not one where he simply shot or stabbed her in the chest.

While its title makes no sense, The Glamorous Life of Sachiko Hanai is an imaginative erotic adventure mixes a discussion of dialectical materialism, Latin phrases like “Deus ex Machina� and “Cogito Ergo Sum,� and the famous file footage of the toppling of the statue of Saddam Hussein in with some rather raunchy behavior of George Bush that will really generate a little shock and awe.

Is this sleaze dressed up as art, or vice-versa? As more and more daring directors opt to push the envelope with similar conversation-provoking pictures, we’ll have to let the debate about what could be an emerging cinematic trend continue.


Excellent (3.5 stars). Unrated. In Japanese with subtitles. Running time: 90 minutes. Studio: Palm Pictures

 

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