One of the more disturbing porn I have seen in recent years was not really porn. I couldn't classify it as that. Not really.
I mean, it has all the necessary fucking. There's one in the beginning which is mostly just nudity, to entice and set things up for the rest of the story. Two fucks in the middle, and one - the pay-off - at the end.
However, the story constantly wanders off to tell the tale about the characters - an old Japanese farmer suffering from dementia who 'milks' his daughter-in-law every morning. He thinks she's a cow called 'Bessie'. The girl allowed him to do so just to go along with his dementia, and also because she, too, wants to fuck him. INCEST!
See, the girl's husband and the farmer's son had died and two of them live alone in a secluded farmhouse that is nearing financial ruin. Both are horny, and you can expect what the finale is a mile away.
What disturbed me were two things. One was that after one daughter of the farmer comes back from the city and gets fucked for cash by an old lover who raped her when she was a teen (sordid past! three-dimensional characters! wow!), we immediately cut from heavy, loud fucking, to a visual of the old man - the farmer - masturbating with a bottle of shampoo/body bath.
I was like, fuck! The juxtaposition of raunchy sex and old man masturbating was disturbing enough, but I disagree more with his choice of lubricant.
Anyway, things happen, characters have arcs, and we get a satisfying resolution to the story, even if there was no fucking (there is). The whole story was, in the end, a meditation on caregiving for the baby boomers, isolation and dementia.
What I can say is that this porn has more depth than most shit I see on TV nowadays, which is the second thing that disturbs me. There is care in the acting, the characterisation and each scene, each shot was lovingly done and created a timeless classic. If I were given enough funds someday to do a movie, I would readily employ these actors - porn stars - to act in my film.
They got it where most people don't. I ended up watching the movie again, and fast-forwarding the sex scenes - who wants to see old men fuck young girls anyway - and enjoying the story, the performance and eventual tragedy of the tale.
Pinku eiga - the period of 'pink cinema' in Japanese porn industry is truly a treasure trove of hidden gems and forgotten, discarded masterpieces.
