SEXUAL DRIVE MOVIE REVIEW
Film Movement
Reviewed for Shockya.com & BigAppleReviews.net, linked from Rotten Tomatoes by Harvey Karten
Director: Kôta Yoshida
Screenwriter: Kôta Yoshida
Cast: Manami Hashimoto, Ryô Ikeda, Mukau Nakamura, Honami Satô, Tateto Serizawa, Shogen, Rina Takeda
Screened at: Critics’ link, NYC, 3/25/22
Opens: April 22, 2022
No film will ever match the conflating of food and sex as well as does the 1963 movie “Tom Jones, and surely “Sexual Drive,” which exhibits not a single body even half nude, is no competition. Tragedies are elevated, whereas comedies have no problem dealing with the body, especially the mouth and the lower regions. “Sexual Drive,” however, flirts with both the high and the low; metaphorically Kôta Yoshida, who wrote and directs the film partly devoted to the workings of the mind, particularly to the narratives of a fellow in the third part of this three-part series, but in every case drives home the point that people in bespoke suits and fashionable dresses are doing little more than covering up their innermost desires for food and sex.
Think of Odysseus who in the classic myth addresses the king of the Phaecians after being shipwrecked on an island, asking for time to finish his dinner before he tells his story: “Eat, drink!” It blots our all the memory of pain, commanding “Fill me up!”“Sexual Drive” deals with people in pain who long to be filled up and whose anxieties revolve around their sexual longings which they try to satisfy with food.
For example, in the first episode called Natto, Kiru (Tateto Serizawa), a shabbily dressed man, enters the home of a fellow whose wife is a nurse, called away on a Sunday for a hospital emergency. Kiru is everyman, confronting people with what is lacking in their lives. In the case of Natto, the reluctant host allows Kiru to present him with his principal concern, but he somehow cannot throw the man out. Kiru chats about the affair he is having with the man’s wife, presenting some truths that any of us men who have had surgery would like to forget—the most painful being the insertion of a catheter into the urethra to drain urine. Kiru calls himself a masochist. The pain turns him on. And somehow observing Kiru’s pain, the nurse is similarly excited. By the time the nurse comes home, starving, her husband has to watch her devouring a bowl of Natto with sexual pleasure, making the man all the more depressed with his own sexless life.
In Mapo Tofu, the second episode, Kiru appears again, this time throwing himself against a car and writhing in pain. The driver, who has panic attacks, is delighted that he is not going to sue her (does anyone sue anybody in Japan?) and gives him a ride to his home. During the ride she has the panic attacks to which she has become accustomed, while her would-be therapist, Kiru, hints that sexual dissatisfaction is the cause of the shaking.
In a more surreal vein, the third chapter, Ramen with Extra Backfat, a woman drinks alone in a bar, then proceeds to one of those noodle shop popular with people who want to save money and avoid self-consciousness of eating alone. A narrator speaks into the earpiece of a well-dressed man, probably an executive, directed toward Momoka who is the only woman in the ramen shop and who is herself trying to drown her lack of sexual satisfaction in food and drink.
This is a niche movie that could divide some folks who love indies and low-budget oddities. One group might turn on from the provocative nature of the movie, since after all it has originality, but others, like me, will be frustrated. Repeat that: frustrated. Those of us in that latter category may wonder whether getting laid before they watch it might change their opinion to a more positive one.
In Japanese with English subtitles.
70 minutes. © 2022 by Harvey Karten, Member, New York Film Critics Online
Story – C+
Acting – B
Technical – B+
Overall – C+