Obscure Japanese Film #6
Based on a short story by Akiyuki Nosaka[1], Asobi tells the story of a 16-year-old girl who meets an 18-year-old boy by chance and falls in love for the first time. However, this is a Yasujiro Masumura film – his last for Daiei before the studio went bankrupt – so it’s by no means as sweet as it sounds. The main story takes place over a period of around 24 hours, but is repeatedly interrupted by abrupt flashbacks, some of which shine a light on the girl’s past and others on the boy’s. She has just finished high school and gone straight into a poorly-paid factory job but is considering going to work as a bar hostess to earn more. Her father is an abusive alcoholic, her sister is sick and confined to her bed, and her mother persistently asks her for money. The boy’s mother (Kurosawa favourite Akemi Negishi) is another alcoholic; he’s fallen in with some extremely nasty yakuza who use him to deceive young girls into going to a hotel where they will be drugged, raped and photographed for pornographic pictures. There is some tension in the story as we wait to see whether the boy will leave the girl in the hands of these creeps.
Unfortunately, what could have been quite a moving tale failed to work for me for a number of reasons. The colour cinemascope photography and editing are very well-executed as one would expect from Masumura, but I never believed that these characters were real people. Despite a good performance by Keiko Takahashi, the girl seems naïve to an absurd degree, while debut actor Masaaki Daimon as the boy – who tries desperately to appear older and tougher than he is – shouts every line of dialogue at the top of his voice, even during a visit to the cinema! Daimon is by no means a bad actor, but I felt that Masumura should have asked him to dial it down a bit. These two characters make a tiresome pair and things are not helped by the over-the-top portrayals of the many sleazy characters who surround them. There’s a high slap-count characteristic of Japanese films of this era (especially those of Masumura), and every slap sounds like a whiplash hitting sheet metal, while the score by Takeo Watanabe sounds like something from an Italian giallo.
The film was likely intended mainly as a vehicle for Keiko Takahashi, Daiei’s controversial young star who had made her debut appearing nude at the age of 15 in the 1970 film High School Student Blues. Altogether, it’s an uneasy combination of sex, violence and sentimentality that fails to gel.
[1] Nosaka also wrote Grave of the Fireflies, as well as the novel upon which Shohei Imamura’s The Pornographers was based.
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