1983 ‘神田川淫乱戦争’ Directed by Kiyoshi Kurosawa
Two sexually energized young women who live in a high-rise apartment building happen one day to spy from their window a mother and son making love in the apartment across from theirs. They decide to stage a rescue attempt to free him and in the process one of the young women ends up falling in love with the son despite having a boyfriend and enjoying sex with her female companion. Of course, the mother they are warring against has her own plans when she feels her privacy invaded.
Kanda-gawa inran senso, Kandagawa Wars, 간다천 음란전쟁, 神田川淫乱战争
Japan
South Korea18
Japan
South Korea
“The body of my child won’t accept any other woman than me”. This pinku about a couple of roommates trying to free a young man from being his mom’s sex slave was Kiyoshi Kurosawa first film. It is rather more playful than the genre usual rawness. Full of strong-willed women and moronic men. His formal control is in full evidence already. It exists in an unusual position between a genre cheapie and a school assignment (Kurosawa’s college actually gets mentioned in the end credits). Kandagawa Wars has a lot of New Wave-like affections, but it is never quite a genre deconstruction because Kurosawa would never treat an assignment as beneath him.
Kiyoshi Kurosawa's subversion of genre conventions and his contemplative and clinical approach to exploring modern society, human connection, and the mind has cemented his reputation as one of the most intriguing and important directors of the past couple of decades. His name is mainly associated with the horror genre, thanks to works including but not limited to Cure and Pulse, so it may come as a surprise to some that much of his early work was not all horror. Before he was making genre-bending masterpieces, he made pink films and direct-to-video films, with his first feature being Kandagawa Wars.
This type of career trajectory is not uncommon in Japan. Many young directors gain valuable training and experience in these markets…
Very few films have such a coltish nature, it's so frisky, utterly unbound, it could last for days and still keep its interest with all its tactile formal playfulness and physical poetry. Moving beyond culture towards unison with the most varied themes and subjects, cinephilia and sex, an Oedipan complex and masculine childishness, love and death, searching for a moment of clarity amid the lunacy and finding it right before falling to your death - the final orgasm. So utterly beautiful in all its excentricity.
Kiyoshi Kurosawa's first movie is a softcore porno romantic comedy student film and it's pretty good
Oddball pinku juvenilia from Kurosawa. The sex, more often than not, is kind of hilariously awkward; though built around it is a strangely moving story of two eccentric young women’s determination to do what they think is the right thing. Spying incestuous shenanigans in the high-rise apartment building across the river from their own, they draw up literal battle plans to charge the building and save the lonely young man from his mother’s advances (“Let’s kill the kisses!”). Kurosawa’s interest in all this youthful anomie and listlessness, having to invent their own half-baked sense of purpose because their world’s given them none better, points to the masterful career to follow. “Say, do you enjoy your work?” “I enjoy it. Yes,…
Kurosawa making his start with a pinku isn't the most surprising thing in the world, but not as surprising as how funny this film was.
Sex is a joke in this movie and ends up being mostly awkward and funny, kinda like the real thing I guess, so that's fun. But there's not much going on here besides people wanting to have sex and stop some incest, but then get their own fucked up ideas going. Oh, and polka music…. I fucking hate polka music, so that did not help. Wish this was like 30-40min instead of a full hour. It's kinda not a big deal, but a lot of this movie was just wasting time.
Imagine submitting this as…
Kiyoshi Kurosawa's debut, the cutest pinku I ever saw. Giddy in love with moviemaking, the way that, say, the ending of Go Go Second Time Virgin can be remixed with a tiny character adjustment and facing the camera the other way around. If the camera can easily represent a voyeur, can cinema itself be sex? We paused the movie and read out the names of directors on the incest idiot boy's wall.
This is pretty cute but the way you know my case of Letterboxd brain has become terminal is that I was making the wrap-it-up gesture during all the sex scenes so I could go back to trying to decipher though the SD image quality the huge list of Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s favorite western/European films that he puts on a character’s wall
