LOVE’S WHIRLPOOL

愛の渦

Directed by Daisuke Miura

Asia Pop! / Japan / 2014 / comedy, sex / 123 mins / Japanese with English subtitles / DCP / West Coast Premiere

Watch Trailer

LOVE’S WHIRLPOOL

UltraStar Mission Valley
Fri, Nov. 7, 2014 9:25 pm

LOVE’S WHIRLPOOL

UltraStar Mission Valley
Thu, Nov. 13, 2014 9:00 pm

Description

Official Selection, 2014 Puchon International Fantastic Film Festival

In a Roppongi backroom, so hidden you have to call in for directions, strangers converge every night for some good old fashioned anonymous sex. On this particular night, four men and four women pay, disrobe, and await the ground rules on how they are to spend the next five hours. Showering is mandatory, emotion is not. What these eight perhaps didn’t bargain for is that between midnight and 5am, they’ll also do a lot of awkward chatting, testing the waters and getting to know the boundaries not just of sex, but of each other’s’ bodies, tastes, and sensitivities.

In other words, it’s a comedy! How could it not be, when one is a schoolteacher, one is a virgin, and everyone is to some extent a pervert? Director Daisuke Miura adapts his own award-winning play and manages to turn a talky waiting room farce into a fanciful hotpot of sex acts and acting sexual, full of the kind of put-ons and protractions that’s led the film to be compared with Buñuel’s. LOVE’S WHIRLPOOL is a hilariously uncomfortable game of social decorum, and an especially devilish one when seen in a dark room with a bunch of strangers. –Brian Hu