Underwater Love - A Pink Musical

Young Asuka (Sawa Masaki) works as a lowly clerk in a fish factory. Her liaison with her boss is soon to culminate in a wedding. But then the unbelievable happens: when Asuka wants to give freedom back to a small fish that survived in the factory, the fish turns out to be a kappa, a Japanese mythical creature in the form of a mixture of human and turtle. But that's not all: the kappa is the reincarnated Aoki (Yoshiro Umezawa), a former childhood crush of Asuka, who drowned several years ago. Now the young woman not only has to decide if her heart belongs to her fiancé or her reborn childhood sweetheart. Along the way, she must also outsmart the god of death - and in the process, there's plenty of singing, dancing and indulging in physical love...

Underwater Love - A Pink Musical is difficult to describe, let alone assign to a cinematic category. In itself, the film follows the tradition of the pink films, those cheaply produced sex films from Japan, which have served many a renowned director as a springboard for a great career. But on the other hand, the film constantly breaks with the traditions of the Pink films, which could not only be due to the experimental director Shinji Imaoka, but also to the German involvement in the form of Rapid Eye Movies and the music of the electropop duo Stereo Total.

The fact that Underwater Love - A Pink Musical was produced with little money and the scenes were generally shot in one take only, is of course clearly visible in the film. Kappa's mask alone is an obvious testament to the low budget. But on the other hand, you can't help thinking that Shinji Imaoka is deliberately playing with the trashy character and, for instance, deliberately has the musical scenes performed in a completely over-the-top and not particularly polished choreographed way with an ironic wink.

Similarly, the sex scenes are far from being erotic, not only because of Kappa Aoki's reptilian genitals, and are so absurd that you can only be amused by them. All the scenery was captured by acclaimed cinematographer Christopher Doyle, who has worked with Wong Kar-Wai on several occasions and who has put a very watchable visual stamp on the film despite its mini-budget.

Surely, Underwater Love - A Pink Musical will only be able to appeal to a very small niche audience with its absurd mix of musical interludes, sex scenes and romantic fantasy story. But those who can and want to get involved with Japanese genre cinema of the very special weird and over-the-top kind could really have a lot of fun here.

An article by Frankfurt-Tipp