Tokyo X Erotica

Choosing Zeze’s pink eiga Tokyo X Erotica is a kind of personal hommage to Rotterdam, as Zeze the pink auteur, it’s fair to say, became internationally established here some years ago and justifiably so: Zeze is a great modern filmmaker. That said, I have to admit that I wasn’t crazy about his later mainstream features such as Hysteric, which was also screened here and which I found rather tame not because of any lack of fucking, mind you! maybe I had too high expectations. In contrast, Tokyo X Erotica feels like one huge explosion, relief squared: This film gets coming and coming just like its madly, wonderfully shamelessly fucking and charmingly flexible protagonists. Although the fucking is so nice that it should be reason enough to enjoy the film, the film’s true brillance lies in the ease with which Zeze builds layer upon layer, developing a piercing vision of the Heisei period, its politics/catastrophes/stateofmind, which he then goes on to transcend into a Zezetypical meditation about rebirth, God, the essence of the human soul, but with a surprisingly ironic touch. So, yes, Tokyo X Erotica is a profound film about everything essential i.e. sex, politics and God packed into about 75 minutes: it’s just perfect.(Olaf Möller writes for Die Welt)