Embrace the movie's title with utmost respect. The adjective ‘colorless' is possibly the most fitting word to describe the spineless nature of Yuka Tanaka (Ruka Ishikawa), a young ‘dokusha moderu' (amateur fashion model) whose vacuous actions set an avalanche of unpleasant events rolling. Takashi might have even built the script around that word, which would explain why Yuka has the disposition of a human-sized speaking doll and why she has no idea how to respond to the question what kind of person she is, admitting she'd rather not find it out. The words coming out of her mouth could have literally only be written by a man who is fighting to grasp how “that other, incomprehensible and difficult gender” communicates. Yuka's spoken words work only before she reveals her breasts for the first time, when her face radiates childish cheerfulness, when she's all giggles and involved in small talk. One wishes, the whole movie dialogue would revolve around photographs and ramen. I suspect that the sea plankton has more charisma than Yuka Tanaka, and I bet I won't be disappointed should I ever encounter one.
“Colorless” is screening at Udine Far East Film Festival 2020
To decipher that complicated enigma of a woman, Takashi seizes for outdated tropes. One of them is openly sexist talk, so archaic that it shows the writer/ director's complete oblivion of its wrongness (“you girls are so ugly, a pig and a rhino”), and hilariously daft monologues about love and you are guessing – “them women”. One of them sticks particularly out, almost like a planted joke. When the titular male character Oyamada (Daichi Kaneko), an aspiring young photographer discovers the existence of dildo (epiphany!) during a photo-shoot (that's how long it took a fully grown man to discover sex toys, because he probably grew up in a cave), he concludes: “this proves women also have sex drives”. Huge if true!
The world is full of preposterous people, needless to search for the statistical proof of it, and there is no reason to exclude them from scripts. But should they be given main space in films that supposedly deal with sensitive topics, such that require particular care? Carelessness with which sexual abuse and a form of forced prostitution (one could debate – hey, but it's only hand jobs! like it's no biggy to rub penises of perverted sweaty middle age men) is treated is surprising, concerning that “Colorless” should be a drama about a young woman who ends up emotionally broken and caught in the web of her own lies, just to be able to hold her head above water.
Yuka is one of many country girls who came to Tokyo to fulfill their dreams, and who suddenly met with harsh reality and very high housing prices and tuition fees, has to make compromises. After being told that she isn't on scholarship, she gets recruited to work in a massage parlor by her acting class buddy Ai Yoshioka, a girl who plays her game very swiftly. They share the same dream – making it big as reader models, a huge stardom ticket in Japan. The difference is in their character – Ai sticks to her plan and ditches her pimp job as soon as she gets the first big gig, and Yuka, shy by nature and not very good at acting, stays stuck doing two jobs, out of which the one as a “massage therapist”.
Officially offering just a massage, the parlor owner turns a blind eye to “extras” that most of the customers ask of all-very-young girls. They get advertised online with their work aliases and blurred faces. The newcomer gets popular through her teenage looks.
But, there won't be many who will side with the victim. Yuka is put in the position of a conformist who lies her way to jobs, male affection and housing. She is possessive, selfish and indecisive, a slob (doesn't cook or clean – shocking!) and a tantrum-thrower.
The film is chaperized in three chapters around specific time-frames, which serve to explain Yuka's calculated plan to find the most ideal solution to her homelessness, breaking the young photographer's heart.
