memories of a film

I'm feeling tipsy and plugged into music from my mp3 player...

I guess it's been a year since I attended movie screenings at the local Japanese film festival. I know this is really random, but I can't help getting reminded of the film every now and then.

Here's the story. There's this young married couple who haven't had sex since they got married, due to the wife's unwillingness to engage in the act. Otherwise, they appear typical of every Japanese family, on the surface.

The girl, thanks to her exceptional memory, is able to answer questions in quiz books on trivia facts with perfection. The guy would quiz her from books after books of trivia quizzes, and she would get all the answers right. Their conversations are practically in a routine and mundane question-and-answer mode. They seem to enjoy it nevertheless.

Things are different outside the home. The guy had resorted to various seduction tactics to get his wife into the act, to no success, and with lots of frustration. To satisfy his sexual needs, the guy had been visiting brothels. The wife (she looks better than the hookers in the film btw) is aware of this fact, having found discount tickets to the seedy joints which were left in his pockets. But she had nothing to offer him.

If I remember correctly, a relative of the girl came to stay over at the couple's home (probably her father), and let the guy in on the reason for the girl's phobic response to sex (Ok, this is the part I couldn't remember that well). When she was a young girl living on a farm, her mother had slept with other men in neighborhood while her father was out working on the land. She came to develop her phobia out of the association of the violent moans she heard from her mother, betrayal, and family break-up, with sex. This was quite a revelation for the guy. He had a better strategy for "rehabilitation" and the movie ended well... they finally made love all night in his car, parked along a deserted highway. The scenes were very tastefully shot. I reckoned it must be one of the more artful ones I've seen on screen. When all was done, the girl was quizzed on trivia the next morning, but she got the answers wrong. She had lost her ability to beat trivia quizzes.

I've watched half a dozen Japanese film at the festival last year, but this stuck. In literature and the arts, sex is never just sex. It would be pornography otherwise. The symbolisms are delicious and apt. Something in there resonated with parts of my consciousness, and still do today. Anyway, I'm too light-headed to search for the film's title and other info, so I'll leave it at this...

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