2/5 stars
“Who do you want to be with at the end of the world?” is the question posed to the young lovers in Haruhiko Arai’s erotic drama It Feels So Good, which was somehow named best film of 2019 by prestigious critical journal Kinema Junpo.
The film stars Kumi Takiuchi, who was named best actress by the same publication, as a young woman who embarks on a torrid affair with an old flame in the days before her marriage to a high-ranking military man.
Between endless bouts of awkward rutting, Naoko (Takiuchi) and Kenji (Tasuku Emoto) keep their energy up by feasting and indulging in lengthy, meandering conversations about their earlier relationship and the partners they have had since. All the while, looming on the periphery is an impending natural disaster more threatening even than Naoko’s wedding.
Erotic “roman porno” films have long had a significant place in Japanese cinema. As early as the 1960s, directors like Koji Wakamatsu larded their exploitation films, full of nudity and violence, with social and political subtext.
Arai cut his teeth scripting films for Wakamatsu before embarking on his own prolific screenwriting career, which includes such gems as Rape Ceremony and Captured Mother and Daughter: She Beast. More recently, Arai adapted Mari Akasaka’s novel Vibrator, and wrote Kabukicho Love Hotel, both for director Ryuichi Hiroki.
Ironically, It Feels So Good cannot even fulfil the overtly suggestive promise of its title, let alone spark any legitimate philosophical debate.
Arai and his performers fail spectacularly to conjure anything remotely arousing during the numerous, lengthy sex scenes. Takiuchi and Emoto have no discernible on-screen chemistry, while the coital choreography is dull, unrealistic, and repetitive.
Takiuchi has proved, in films such as Eiji Uchida’s Greatful Dead and Hiroki’s Side Job, that she is an engaging screen presence, capable of so much more than simply disrobing for the camera. Opposite Emoto, who exudes all the charisma of a bucket of fish heads, she is left to drown in pseudointellectual gibberish.
Watching It Feels So Good does not just feel less good than Arai might have intended; with a running time of 115 minutes it becomes an interminable chore.
The apocalyptic navel-gazing of its finale is a desperate last-ditch attempt to evoke the superior talents of Arai’s former collaborators, but serves only to expose the yawning chasm that separates them.
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