Chotto kawaii aian meiden
Director: Kôta Yoshida
Writer: Kôta Yoshida
Based on: Makoto Fukami and Alpha AlfLayla’s manga
Cast: Noriko Kijima, Haruna Yoshizumi, Reiko Hayama, Yuki Mamiya, Kanako Mochida, Nami Motoyama
Part of: /slash Filmfestival
[Review by Maynard Morissey.]

Plot:
Yuzuki (Noriko Kijima) is accepted into the school of her dreams, but it takes quite a different turn for her when she stumbles upon Aoi (Haruna Yoshizumi) masturbating in the shower by hitting herself. Her interest in the scene is reason enough that she is roped into one of the school’s clubs, at first against her will: the Torture Club. Here the girls train to withstand all kinds of torture in order to become spies. But Yuzuki can’t stop thinking about Aoi.

The Torture Club is less of a film and more of a drawn out wank fantasy for men interested in women. It would have served the film better if it had been made exactly like what it is – a sub-par porn – instead of selling the entire thing as a sexually explicit RomCom.

The film has a lesbian love story at its heart, which is commendable. There are not enough lesbian love stories on screen, except in porn made for straight men there are about a billion of them. And instead of actually caring about the characters, they always pander to the male gaze – and this is exactly what is going on here. Representation is not the same as fetishization.

The film shows a certain sense of humor – like when strawberries appear over pussies since this isn’t actually a porn film, can’t you tell – and I’m pretty certain that their explanation as to why a school would have a BDSM club (I hesitantly call it that because this has very little to nothing to do with actual BDSM) – i.e. “it’s spy training” – is supposed to be funny, but it hit all the wrong nerves for me in this context. (Apart from the facts that a, actual torture has nothing to do with BDSM, b, withstanding torture is probably only a very small part of spy training anyway and c, why don’t they have a fucking teacher if it’s training?)

Honestly when I wasn’t annoyed by the film or imagining the amount of (teenage) boners this film would produce as opposed to how few pussies it would make wet, I was really very bored by it. Which is rather amazing for a film that shows attractive people kinda fucking most of the time. That should be interesting, except it isn’t. Not when it’s so obviously made for a very limited group of people. A group that I don’t belong to and a group that has most of the porn-y stuff made for it anyway.

There is tons os stuff like this out there. But I felt almost personally offended by this one in particular because it pretends to be something it’s not. It shouldn’t have bothered.

Summarizing: I hated it.