Asian Film Festival of Dallas, Part 2

Welcome to Earth Two. (Isn't that where Superman ended up sometimes, a place where things seemed earthlike but somehow different.) In this case its located at the Cafe Rakkyo, an Osaka Host Bar that is the subject of Jake Clenell's documentary The Great Happiness Space, Tale of an Osaka Love Thief. Host bars are hosted by modern-day male geishas, young men who adopt an extreme high-fashion look involving asymmetrical haircuts with highlights, make up, designer suits, and lots of bling. To me they looked like transgendered dolls, but for Japanese women they apparently push all the right buttons. At the bar they entertain their female clients, showering them with compliments, tempting them with sex which seldom happens, and forming “relationships” that last the night, maybe weeks, possibly for months. The only thing that flows more freely than champagne is cash. These women are spending it seems at least a thousand dollars per visit, and as the $600 to $1000 bottles of champagne continue to get chugged down, the tab can reach into five figures.

 

Who are these women is the logical question that comes to mind. In the film you see the young men working the streets, using some pretty good pick-up lines on fashionably dressed young women. But it turns out that their best clients are women in basically their same line of work, hostesses or prostitutes willing to spend their money to receive the hosts lavish attentions. Employees of Cafe Rakkyo bring home between $10,000 and $50,000 per month.

The Great Happiness Space left the audience amused, mystified, and slightly depressed. There was much head-scratching when it over. You can see the entire 75 minute film on the internet. And a google search for “host bars” will get you everything from advertisements to scholarly articles.

Sunday night featured two of the higher profile films of the Festival. Stehane Gauger's Owl and the Sparrow won both the critics award and the best narrative feature award. Sang-il Lee's Hula Girls is the official Japanese entry for the 2007 Academy Awards.

 

Gauger is a European who was born and raised in Saigon, a city he demonstrates both a deep knowledge of and affection for in this film. Shot in high def video with hand-held cameras, it has the swift, upclose feel of a the French New Wave, and tells the story of a twelve-year-old girl who runs away from the factory run by her uncle to live on the street in Saigon. Gauger depicts Saigon street life in what is surely a more benign vision than the reality would merit, but the young girl has the good fortune to meet up with an female airline attendant and a zoo keeper who both help her in their own ways.

I think I just made the movie sound terrible, but Auger's characters are sweet and complex, and you find yourself wishing them all the best of luck. This is at a far remove from the situation created in Hula Girls, a feel-good movie that must have been written with a cliché checklist by the word processor. It fits into a genre perfected over the past decade by the British with films like Brassed Off, The Full Monty, Calendar Girls, and Kinky Boots. Hula Girls even involves a coal mine shutting down, although this one is in Northern Japan and not Northern England. As the town faces financial disaster, someone has the “crazy” idea to use the area hot springs to create an Hawaiian-themed attraction complete with hula girls. The coal miner's daughters first hesitantly start classes with the frowzy, aging showgirl who comes to lead the troupe. Everyone is against them, and they are terrible, but guess what? Everyone comes around and the girls turn out to be great! Hurray!

Hula Girls was so far the only crassly commercial film of the festival, at least among those I have seen, and it has “Audience Favorite” written all over it. Expect a free preview sponsored by KERA sometime in the near future. It's that kind of movie.