Hiroyuki Oki | あなたが好きです、大好きです(Anata-ga suki desu, dai suki desu) (I Like You, I Like You Very Much) / 1994

the shooting star

by Douglas Messerli

 

Hiroyuki Oki (screenplay and director) あなたが好きです、大好きです(Anata-ga suki desu, dai suki desu) (I Like You, I Like You Very Much) / 1994

 

Plot is not a significant element of Japanese director Hiroyuki Oki’s challenging “Pink”* film of 1994, Anata-ga suki desu (I Like You, I Like You Very Much). In fact, there isn’t actually a narrative plot in this film in the usual way in which we conceive it. A few things happen: waiting at a station for a train in order to return home, Yu encounters a somewhat beefy guy, Taka, waiting on the bench with him and apparently falls immediately in love, running after him when they reach their destination in Kochi to report: “I like you, I like you very much”—words I’ve been told by Asian film scholar Earl Jackson that in the Japanese, suki desu, mean something much stronger than a mere “liking.” 

      In any event, the boys soon after are observed in Taka’s apartment having sex, seeming to ejaculate several times, at one point when the cum is visible on Taka’s upper chest, Yu preventing him from wiping it up as he leans into hug and kiss him again and again, finally licking up the sticky residue with his tongue.

       Later Yu admits his infidelity to his lover Shin and the two have a sort of breakdown, wherein Shin, running into Taka at the same train station, tells him to take care of Yu, with the two lovers further quarreling over Shin’s action. Yu returns drunk to his old lover and his new boyfriend for consolation while both attempt to get him into their bed before he passes out, and Shin seeks out late-night sex in a group masturbation scene in a local park.

      In the morning the two, Yu and Shin, come back together realizing that they love one another far deeper than any of the other temporary sexual experiences they have had in the hours previous, watching the “hot” and apparently straight Taka passing on his daily run by the field in which they have laid out sheets to breakfast upon. As one commentator observes, this “soft porn” film ends in a completely romantic note.

     If that’s all there is, many viewers will be terribly disappointed watching this film—as many obviously were in their early comments about the work. Although there is lots of sex, as Andrew Grossman writes in Bright Lights Film Journal:

 

“I Like You’s shadowy sex scenes are a muddle of lifeless realism and private intensity, combining organic, naturally recorded sounds with looped panting. In a Japan where the penis is (more or less) verboten, the sex never dares to cross the threshold of hardcore; as is frequently the case with Japanese erotica, however, neurotic censorships only facilitate fetishes that would not otherwise exist. Most conspicuously, Shin’s jockstrap serves not only the pragmatic function of camouflaging genital taboos, but becomes a nearly metaphysical totem that crystallizes the longings of those who gaze upon it. Though at times excruciatingly tedious, the film’s monotonous seaside atmosphere lingers in the memory, and the tedium does eventually blur into a kind of melancholic relaxation, even if the undernourished characters who populate this milieu remain as alien to us as they are to each other.”

 

     Actually, I found Oki’s hand-held camera swirling around the sweaty bodies of Yu and Taka as they fuck again and again—emptying themselves of everything other than physical contact in a  manner that might even remind one, at moments akin to a gay version of Nagisa Ōshima’s In the Realm of the Senses—truly arousing. Unlike Ōshima’s couple, however, their encounter only goes on for a single sexual session, even if Yu continues to remain on a sexual high many hours later. But in this film even that becomes almost comic, as Brandon Kemp describes it, “When a girl with short-cropped hair sitting next to Yu hears him muttering it to himself with headphones in, she pulls them out and listens. There’s no music!’” Yu goes on to express the most poetic lines of the film: “A shooting star passed…for the first time ever. It soared straight through the sky inside my heart.”

     For in contradiction to his world of temporary bliss is the world in all of these various lovers exist. The coastal town of Kochi, primarily a fishing and agricultural center, is a bleached-out village—the fact of which Oki’s overexposed outdoor images constantly accentuate—wherein everyone seems to live in ramshackle three-to-four story apartment complexes whose major access are the winding backyard paths over which are flung lines of drying shirts and pants and which are themselves lined by garbage bins. The town center, such as it is, seems to be a dusty, telephone-lined street with fast-food restaurants almost in the manner of many US Midwest burgs. There is little here for individuals like Taka, Shin, Yu, and Yu’s ex-lover to do but to engage in sex. Compared to the marvels of Tokyo and Kyoto, Kochi might as well be on another planet.

      Everyone seems to know everyone, moreover, and privacy is not even a consideration, as the redeemed lovers Yu and Shin, after their night of dissolution, hug and kiss one another in an open field as legions of high school boys and girls and morning adult exercisers shuffle and run by, only Taka, in a gymnastic somersault of approval for their reunion, seeming to even take notice of them.

      In this world all the boys seem to have the poster for US director Gregg Araki’s The Living End on their walls, suggesting their commitment to what critic B. Ruby Rich has described as the New Queer Cinema with which this fascinating film, as well as its character’s lives, have little in common. But the dangerously humorous “on the road” adventures of Araki’s film seems a suitable goal for these aimless boys who use sex as their link to the world of beauty and pleasure their society seems unable to provide.

 

*Japanese “Pink” films, most often heterosexual in nature but also, at times, homosexual, are quickly made and inexpensively filmed works that feature sex and violence, while sometimes bordering on pornography. Held in low esteem in Japan, they have nonetheless, become cult favorites and many of their directors have been able through these films to move into the more established cinema filmmaking. For some directors the grade B- Pink films have almost served as a badge of their disinterest in establishment film.

 

Los Angeles, August 27, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (August 2022).