Love & Pop

Hideaki Anno (known for directing the Evangelion animation series) directed this timely film, Love & Pop (1998), about "enjo kosai" (compensation dating) that was rife in the late 90s. It is based on a novel by Ryu Murakami called Topaz II. Basically, teenage girls were being paid to go on dates with middle aged men and often would go as far as to have sex with them for money. This story focuses on four teenage girls: Asami Miwa as Hiromi, Kirari as Chisa, Hirono Kudo as Nao, and Yukie Nakama as Chieko. Chisa and Yukie are old pros when it comes to dating and implore Hiromi and Nao to join it to get money. Hiromi is dead set on getting an expensive ring and decides to do dates all day to get the ring. So has less direction than the others and has a couple of unpleasant experiences that are likely to put her off enjo kosai for the foreseeable future. Anno used some really interesting camera techniques that come off like the Go-Pro cameras of today which provide a point of view of the wearer. Love & Pop was filmed almost entirely on hand-held digital camea, and contains some very unusual camera work, including several different mounted camera positions, like on a model train. The film also flips from widescreen to a 4.3 aspect ratio, distorts (with effects such as a fisheye lens), confuses, and makes use of overlays stacked in layers to convey the character's emotions. This film is essentially a cautionary tale for young girls who might not know any better that to sell themselves cheap. I remember there was a Japanese sociological book that analyzed this problem with the translated title of The Choices of Uninformed Schoolgirls. I suppose this isn't as big of a problem today, but I still see cases in the news of people who are arrested to for paying for sex with underage girls. The phone club thing seems to be a relic of the past, it seems that the LINE application has been used to set up the dates these days. Strange that this is a problem in this first world country where in most others women are driven to prostitution mostly as a last resort.