Honeymoon

• Directed By: Dražen Štader
• Country: Slovenia
• Released: 2007
• Running Time: 58 minutes
• Links: Official Site
• Buy It: Brink DVD
• Documentary, Exploitation, Reviews

Japanese culture has a not undeserved reputation for being a bit wacky at times, at least to Western eyes. Plenty of people, working in various media, have sought to bring this wackiness to Western audiences with varying degrees of success, the more successful attempts being the ones that manage to find a balance between novelty and depth. While the novelty of something new and strange can draw us in, there needs to be some depth to maintain our interest. Of course, it is possible to get around this by simply presenting endless novelty.

With Honeymoon, Slovenian director Dražen Štader brings us a view of Paradise TV, a sex channel on Tokyo television. This is not your average sex channel and, even though the studio appears to amount to little more than a couple of corridors and an editing suite, Paradise TV manages to pull off a constant stream of interactive sex chat, 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

We start by meeting Ono, a young employee of the show who spends his time playing video games and dreaming of becoming a director. Today, two days before Christmas, is Ono’s big chance. Kobayashi, a senior director at the network, is allowing Ono into the director’s seat for the duration of a show. Honeymoon, the film, closely follows the production process and the provides an explicit view of the results.

To his credit, Štader has managed to gain a remarkable degree of access to both the studio and the people involved in the production. The individuals he speaks to are strikingly candid and, for the first half of the film, we are presented with a genuinely interesting look at a part of Japan’s burgeoning porn industry.

As director, Ono must interview the irrepressibly cheerful Makoto, a young actress and aspiring adult film star for whom Ono’s production is her big break. In many ways this is the most interesting part of the film, and it’s certainly the most revealing in terms of how Paradise TV operates. Although described as a casting interview, there is a very strong sense that Makoto already has the job and what we see instead is a run-through of what she can expect viewers to ask for and some negotiation over what she is and is not willing to do.

There is a lot of potential in this film and Štader is clearly seeking to use the workings of Paradise TV as a prism with which to view Japanese society in general and the collision between porn, exploitation and reality TV in particular. Unfortunately, in the second half of the film, he starts finding it increasingly difficult to avoid focussing on the porn.

While there are some cuts to the editing suite and back to the casting interview, the film increasingly resorts to showing us a series of scenes, featuring Makoto in various positions and stages of undress, taken directly from Ono’s programme. Much as it surprises me to say this, it does all start to get a bit repetitive.

Honeymoon is not a bad film by any stretch of the imagination but it does promise a lot more than it delivers. If you are in the mood for seeing a more adult take on the “Wacky Japan” genre of programming, this film is well worth checking out but, ultimately, this is all that the film supplies.