‘The Lowlife’: Japanese Film Looks To ‘Demystify’ Porn Industry

A new Japanese film has now opened in Hong Kong, depicting one weekend in the life of three women working in the Tokyo porn—or “AV,” as it is called in Japan—industry, and the positive reception received by director Takahisa Zeze’s The Lowlife in its debut at last year’s Tokyo Film Festival appears to have carried overseas. According to a review in Hong Kong’s English-language South China Morning Post newspaper, Zeze’s film takes an empathetic view of women in the porn industry and of the industry itself—saving its emotional drama for the home lives of its characters, who encounter rejection and misunderstanding in their social circles. The Lowlife “doesn’t depict the world of porn as a dangerous and exploitative hellscape,” the Post wrote. “All three women fare just fine in front of the cameras. Their persecution and humiliation comes instead from those in the real world, particularly their families, who refuse to accept or understand them.” The film’s empathy for the three fictional porn actresses likely comes from the screenplay’s source material: a novel by Japanese AV star Mana Sakura, a veteran of the Tokyo porn industry from 2012 to 2014 whose resumé includes such titles as 10 Drug Fuck with Swimsuit Model, Addicted to Abnormal Sex, Let's Sex in the School, and Accepting Molester Girl. Director Zeze also has an affinity for the subject matter. His start as a director in the Japanese film industry came in the genre called pinku eiga, or “pink films”—the sort of movie that might be called “softcore porn” and shown on late-night Cinemax in the United States. “During that time, I developed friendships with actresses in the pink industry,” Zeze told Screen Daily. “I did not have any prejudice nor was I looking down or disregarding the nature of their work. For me, pink film is just a special form of filmmaking.” “Without ever suggesting that acting in the porn industry is the answer to anyone’s problems, The Lowlife says that women who choose this path are mothers, sisters, wives and daughters, and do not deserve the scorn that’s frequently heaped upon them,” wrote a reviewer of the film in Variety. “It’s a message that’s very well delivered by Zeze’s sensitive direction and uniformly fine performances from a clearly committed cast.” The film contains several scenes of explicit sex, though according to the South China Morning Post, those scenes “are employed to develop characters, rather than offering cheap titillation.” When he was casting the film, Zeze says that he encountered few actresses who had an issue with the graphic sexuality in the film—but they balked at “portraying the life of an AV actress,” Zeze told Screen Daily. Image via Plan B Marketing YouTube Screen Capture