Gate of Flesh (1988)
directed by Hideo Gosha
starring Rino Katase, Yûko Natori
88 Films
Even in the bombed out ruins of post-war Tokyo, life still goes on, but that life is beyond difficult and people have to band together to figure out a way to market whatever skills they have in order to survive. In director Hideo Gosha’s 1988 remake of Gate of Flesh (1964), a group of women engage in sex work as a means to the end of building their own dancehall and being successful and liberated in the dawn of new Tokyo. But to achieve their goal they’ll have to confront rival girls, upstart mobsters, the U.S. military, and their own haunted pasts.
In this 1988 remake of the Seijun Suzuki 1964 classic, Sen Asada (Rino Katase) and her merry band of pan-pan girls, who sport nicknames like Baby and Borneo Maya, work the streets selling sex and saving for their dream of opening a dancehall called Paradise. They all live together in a bombed-out building, where a one-ton piece of unexploded ordnance still hangs in mid-air, wedged in a hole in an upper floor and precariously tied off with ropes. The women treat the bomb like a Shinto shrine giving them inner strength to persevere and providing very real protection, as no one wants to mess with their home for fear of the bomb exploding. When strangers enter the mix, the women’s lives and priorities change, ultimately pulling them apart. With her makeshift family scattered, Sen befriends a rival pan-pan gang’s leader, and the two of them team up for revenge before Sen destroys all that she has built to create her own paradise.
Gate of Flesh, which was released in the west with the nonsensical title Carmen 1945, may be a movie about sex workers, but it never looks down on them. All the women are allowed to retain their identities and dignity in a cruel and unforgiving world. They have strength in numbers, and the close sisterhood they share keeps all of them going. It is when they drift apart that tragedy strikes. The film can be viewed as a pretty radical feminist statement, especially for the late 1980s in Japan. The women all wear western clothes, which are blatantly anachronistic trendy dresses from the ’80s, lending the film a slightly surreal edge, as none of the women feel of their time and place in their brightly colored rayon frocks. Hideo Gosha is too exacting a filmmaker for the fashion choices to not be deliberate, and the clothes certainly make the women stand out as beautiful flowers against a background of unrelenting black and grey, both literally and metaphorically.
Available on home video for the first time outside of Japan, Gate of Flesh is a gorgeous treasure. Created in a very different time, Hideo Gosha’s film stands on its own merit. Giving a nostalgic, yet melancholy take, the story is bookended with shots of the contemporary skyscrapers in Tokyo built on the site of Sen’s doomed girl gang. The film is augmented with an introduction by Earl Jackson, an interview with Toei tattoo artist Seiji Mouri, and freewheeling audio commentary from Jasper Sharp and Amber T., who are fast becoming a favorite commentary team.
