Rather
a sweet romantic comedy with a silly soundtrack. Has a nice magical
realism thing going on where the relationship between the two main
protaganists becomes part of the ecosystem and makes the fishies happy.
Also features one of the best seduction-by-posh-cheese portrayals ever,
showing just how fast and deadly it can be as a tactic.
Echoes of Seijun Suzuki’s Gate of Flesh in one part where it’s suggested that the most important things in life are food and sex.
In contrast however to Suzuki’s film where the women have been
abandoned by their husbands who died in the war, and left them without
means, then brutalised before turning to prostitution to survive, and
coming to believe that food and sex are the only things that can be
relied on, that finer emotions aren’t to be trusted, even though they
still dream and yearn for the ‘gate of flesh’…this film holds them up
to be the basis of a life well lived, desires that should be embraced
rather than rejected, food, sex, and thinking for no reason with no
restriction are the escape from the dreary repetitive world of the
coporate wage-slave salaryman. Real Freedom, not the freedom to drink
pepsi rather than coke.