East Meets West

Browsing through some more of Jasper Sharp’s Behind the Pink Curtain this lovely weekend I came across a discussion of Sachiko Hamano, who is an unusual figure in that she is not only a woman director of Japanese “pink” films, but also describes herself as a feminist. Sharp thoughtfully includes an image from her immense (possibly as many as 300-film) oeuvre:

That’s actress Yukari Sakurada, seen engaged in interesting activities in the shower, in the even more interestingly-titled Greedy Housewives 2: Take Me to Heaven Technique (2003).

There follows a curious discussion of whether Hamano’s work can really be called anything like feminist, given that it (according to Sharp, anyway) is more raunchy even than standard pink fare, whether the fact that Hamano’s heroines are highly aggressive, perhaps even insatiable, somehow makes up for this, etc. etc.

All this film-criticism splooge went more or less right over my head though, because all I could think of was this:

That’s Uschi Digard in the shower, as seen in every teenage boy’s favorite, the “Catholic High School Girls in Trouble” segment of Kentucky Fried Movie (1977).

Some ideas just have a universal appeal, I guess.

Postscript: I wonder if anyone is ever going to attempt to make Catholic High School Girls in Trouble.