Raigyo, otherwise known as Woman with Black Underwear, is a pinku eiga film directed by Zeze Takahisa. It randomly came up on a tracker I use, and with a plot summary of “a black clad woman murders a man that she had just met by chance through a phone sex club”, of course I had to watch it.
I’m getting into Japanese softcore porn-art movies called pinku, having been impressed with the films of Koji Wakamatsu and Hisayasu Sato, although I’m a little confused as to why these films fall under the umbrella of softcore porn movies. The sex — formulaic, yet somehow deeply disgusting, is the least interesting part. The pinku eiga I’ve stumbled across are more rooted in a desolate, cruel vision of Japanese society than sensuality or even pornography.
So clearly, Raigyo was not nearly as titillating as its plot makes it sound. It falls under the “alienated people wandering around an industrial landscape” genre of movie more than anything related to porn. The film is even named after a kind of fish so infested with worms that restaurants refuse to buy it from the destitute fishermen that inhabit the area’s polluted waters…get the idea? A good rule of thumb you should follow as someone who I assume is interested in cinema is that you should not be tricked by movies that are suffocatingly bleak. Even disregarding the fact that the divine is the truth, and the divine can never be depressing, it’s just boring to watch movies so mired in evil, with no reprieve or escape. It’s so lazy of a filmmaker to make this kind of stuff. It can be cathartic, but does it really invigorate the soul?
This film is too deliberately bleak to actually be a good movie, but it is rather thematically rich. Children are a touchstone of sadness and a motivating force throughout Raigyo. The question of if murder committed in the name of children is worth it is constantly brought up throughout the film, most interestingly in the context of the main character’s emotional instability, which appears to arise from childhood sexual trauma.
Noriko is an interesting character — she is indifferent, spacey, and submissive until she is not. The rage bubbling under her surface explodes in a brilliant scene where she murders a man she calls for sex in a red-tiled shower. Once swallowed up by a big black blazer, she crawls around on the floor bestially as she stabs a guy just for giving her money after some casual sex. Is his disrespect worth the murder? Even though he’s revealed to be serially cheating on his pregnant wife?
Probably not, but you already know it’s important for cinema to show women as actually morally complex, even evil. I always stress this not just because of the rote feminist idea that men are always afforded this same complexity in art, but because something evident to me is that women are just as capable of evil as men are. However, there are ways to make movies like this without drowning the whole affair in such bleakness like Raigyo does — it devalues this truth, putting it on the same worthless level as a throwaway shot of a polluted lake. Women can be bad? Oh well, the world can be bad! It’s all so tiresome. Things can be specifically interesting, right? A situation doesn’t always call for zooming out to the big picture.
Just like women’s obsession with bad boys, evil women like Noriko would be nothing without the men who go down the rabbit hole of their evil with them. The fisherman Kazuaki can’t help himself from fucking a woman he knows killed someone in a sex encounter because he’s as much of a man as Noriko is a woman. In his instance, the physical prowess of a man overcomes his mental weakness — but Raigyo advances the argument that in the battle of the sexes, no one wins.
Another area where I give this film license to be so dire is when it shows the awkward, destructive nature of casual sex. It is extremely difficult to navigate the cognitive dissonance of “just” wanting to fulfill your biological desires, especially when the bond that arises from sex between two people that ostensibly love each other is broken in the case of Noriko and her victim’s wife. The buildup to the murder in the love hotel is an excellent scene, indistinguishable from a john picking up a prostitute. Even the soon-to-be victim asks Noriko if she’s a “pro” due to her detached response to it all. What other kind of reaction is she supposed to have? And what distinguishes them all from prostitutes except the fact that they’re not getting paid? After seeing people with the kinds of malfunctions and past traumas in Raigyo bounce off of each other so haphazardly, I’m surprised more people don’t die on the Tinder circuit — the analogue in this 1997 film being a shady “dating service” advertised at a phone booth.
As you can tell, I was affected by this movie and thought it had a lot to chew on thematically. Unfortunately, a movie is not a series of themes, and the themes overpower any kind of story that’s being told here. That’s okay though, because it’s pretty good for a softcore porn.