The Glamorous Life of Sachiko Hanai
Sachiko Hanai (Emi Kuroda) is a sex worker at an imekura (or sexual role-play club). Blessed with a curvy figure and an aptitude for her work, she’s otherwise entirely ordinary until she becomes an unwilling witness to a shooting in a coffee shop -- and takes a round from the killer (Takeshi Ito) that lodges in her forehead.
Instead of silencing her, the bullet sends her IQ soaring. She devours books by Kant, Sartre, Sontag and Chomsky and starts spouting brainy babble. She visits seedy professor Saeki (Yukijro Hotaru), who authored one of her favorite tomes, and soon becomes his ultimate erotic playmate - one who can quote from "The Critique of Pure Reason" as she climaxes. Saeki installs her in his home as a tutor to his nerdy son (Tetsuaki Matsue), while his skeptical wife (Kyoko Hayami) wonders what is really going on behind closed doors. Meanwhile, Sachiko's would-be killer -- a North Korean spy -- is on her trail to not only finish what he started: to retrieve the cloned ICBM trigger finger of George W. Bush that Sachiko picked up on her dazed way out the coffee shop door.
THE GLAMOROUS LIFE OF SACHIKO HANAI began life as Pink film, the durable Japanese soft-core genre, with the title “Horny Home Tutor: Teacher’s Love Juice” but it soon developed into a cult hit and the producers allowed director Meike Mitsuru to expand it and in its present form it was re-released to independent art screens. While still following the pink formula -- one scene of simulated sex every 10 minutes or so -- the film rudely satirizes everything from academic pretension to current American foreign policy.
“Entertaining”
Manhola Dargis, The New York Times
“Four stars (out of five)
A weird, hilarious wet dream for intellectuals”
Mark Schilling, Japan Times
Official Selection: Scanners 2005, Chicago 2005 Philadelphia 2006, San Francisco 2006, Fantasia 2006, Austin 2006, Santa Barbara 2007