Blind Love

Pink Eiga

All Region NTSC

Daisuke Goto has followed A Lonely Cow Weeps at Dawn with an Equally unusual Pink film Blind Love. It won a Silver Medal at the 2005 Pink Eiga Awards and was an official selection at the 2009 New York Asian Film Festival.

In this film Goto continues he adventures in Pink cinema but he takes a route very different from that of most other Pink cinema directors. While he fills his films with nudity, quite explicit sex and eroticism, he places a strong emphasis on character development and social interactions. Goto likes to take a small group of individuals and explore the sexual and emotional dynamics between them. In Blind Love they are a strange and divergent group which includes Daisuke who is convinced his work as a ventriloquist has relevance in a world that no longer seems interested in what he does. Yoichi, his assistant, Hikari the love interest and her friend Luna.

Kato Daisuke (Shota Kotaki) is a struggling ventriloquist who seems to live in a dream world. He is convinced of the artistic merit of his performances while audiences find his act boring and children cry at the strange jokes he performs with his dummy. However one person is impressed, her name is Hikari (Konatsu), and she loves the sound of his voice, she also is blind.

When she visits Daisuke’s to bring him flowers she confuses his assistant Yoichi (Yota Kawase) for him. Slowly a very strange love triangle develops; she loves the voice of Daisuke and the touch of Yoichi, so things get very weird. The film includes all sorts of unusual scenes as Yochi enjoys developing a relationship with Hikari but with Daisuke present all the time, you can get the drift of where this is all going.

While this is a challenging and intriguing film, there is a strange imbalance in the plot in that while it explores a very unusual form of love triangle the story is punctuated by attempts at humour which do not work especially well. Other characters do add some texture to the tale especially Luna, Hikari’s friend who services businessmen to pay her bills.

Pink Eiga has stacked on the extras with this title. There is an Introduction to Blind Love followed by a Q & A with the director from the New York Asian Film Festival. There is quite a comprehensive interview with Daisuke Goto and a further interview with Cinematographer Masahide Iioka. There is also an audio commentary with Daisuke Goto and Masahide Iioka.

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This review will appear in Volume 3 No.2 of the digital and print edition of Synergy Magazine.

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