LALA PIPO (Japan, 2009)
Directed by: Masayuki Miyano
Starring: Hiroki Narimiya, Yuri Nakamura, Tomoko Murakami, Sarutoki Minagawa

In 2007, Tetsuya Nakashima’s MEMORIES OF MATSUKO easily took home the New York Asian Film Festival’s Audience Award, beating out the nearest contender by hundreds of votes. We don’t have a movie directed by Nakashima (who also directed KAMIKAZE GIRLS) in this year’s festival, but we do have LALA PIPO, a movie written by him. First-time director Masayuki Miyano recreates the Jolly Rancher-colored, anything-goes surrealist spirit of MEMORIES OF MATSUKO only this time the film isn’t about love overcoming all obstacles. This time the movie is about sex. Really dirty sex.

Adapted from a sex-stuffed cult novel, LALA PIPO (a play on the phrase “A Lot of People”) follows divergent seedy strands of sexual and narrative spaghetti through the sticky Tokyo night. There’s a chubby freelance writer who’s so obsessed with masturbating to the sound of his upstairs neighbors going at it that he forgets to deal with his own love life and when he finally does have sex he is immediately filled with self-loathing. The upstairs neighbor’s story then splits off like an amoeba: she’s an office lady seduced by a “talent scout” who is falling down the sex industry ladder, moving from hostess, to massage girl, to private karaoke attendant. The talent scout’s story then splits off and runs in its own direction, revealing the sorry state of this young pimp’s soul. From there, the movie takes more and more time to consider the lives of more and more characters until the entire Japanese sex industry is filled with the wailing of lost souls.

But don’t despair, because this movie is also full of talking penises, UFOs, fetishes so bizarre they’re not even on the internet yet, giant superheroes, and some of the sickest jokes that you’ll hate yourself for laughing at. It’s all a great big ball of fun, and no matter how sordid things get the movie never loses its sense of optimism that maybe tonight things are going to get better and this time around the sex might really mean something.