94 minutes)
Tomi works as a bar hostess–essentially a prostitute–so other students look down on Yumi. Though her mother is an attractive woman, she's considered over-the-hill by some clients, and because she sometimes drinks to excess, even her colleagues view her as inferior.
Yoshimura goes down hard and fast, and Tomi doesn't hesitate to tell Yumi she'll turn herself in.
So, even if Masumura hews to the heightened tropes of melodrama or exploitation fare, it really is unlikely that Yumi or her mother would have reported her rape, and just as unlikely that Tomi would have claimed self-defense when the rapist grabbed his victim and threatened to abduct her. (That said, the authorities do respond when Yumi reports a later rape attempt.)
Like Giulietta Masina in Nights of Cabiria, though, Yumi has a certain effervescent quality. She's the living embodiment of a bouncy American pop hit from the 1980s: "Ain't nothing gonna break my stride, nobody gonna slow me down, oh no, I got to keep on moving..."
There's also a fun sequence with Yumi and Nozawa making love on a round, Pink Panther-like rotating hotel bed, though I have to admit that Atsumi looks uncomfortable in every single one of her nude scenes.
"I hate men."
--Yumi (Mari Atsumi)
I don't know if Japanese filmmaker Yasuzō Masumura ever saw Fellini's Nights of Cabiria–though he did study film in Italy in the 1950s–but without imitating the Italian master in any way, he proves just as empathetic to sex workers in this 1970 melodrama-meets-exploitation film about a fatherless young woman who turns to sex work when other options prove elusive.
As Play It Cool begins, 20-year-old Yumi (Mari Atsumi, a Daiei contract player like her director) shares a cramped flat on the wrong side of the tracks with her single mother, Tomi (Anatahan's Akemi Negishi), while attending dressmaking school. Her mother, who had her as a teenager, wants her daughter to get a useful education, work in a respectable field, and settle down with a good man–all the things she had to do without.
This isn't a Mildred Pierce or Imitation of Life situation with an all-sacrificing mother and an ungrateful, social-climbing daughter. The two genuinely care about each other, but they're just a couple of defenseless women living in a man's world, and they can't even count on the support of other women.
Worse yet, her live-in boyfriend, freeloading, semi-employed insurance salesman Yoshimura (Ryôichi Tamagawa), eyes Yumi lasciviously whenever she's around. She pays him no mind, and her mother looks the other way, because he promised he would leave her alone--she also believes that "without a man, life isn't worth living." Fate will soon prove otherwise.
One night while Tomi is at work, Yumi and Yoshimura play poker. She's really good, but that isn't the problem. The problem is his libido compounded by a loss of sexual interest in Tomi. The minute Yumi lets her guard down, he grabs her, slaps her around, and rapes her. I wouldn't consider Masumura a timid filmmaker, but he doesn't get too graphic here–Play It Cool isn't a pinku eiga or pink film. He makes the point quickly and moves along.
Yumi doesn't fall apart or lash out, but she's numb with shock. She may be naïve, but she's no shrinking violet. When her mother returns home, she tells her what happened. Surprisingly, Yoshimura doesn't deny it, but blames Tomi. God forbid a woman age. In her anger and confusion, she tells him to leave and slaps her daughter. When he grabs Yumi to take with him–as if she possibly wanted more of his abuse–Tomi stabs him with a butcher knife.
She believes in paying for her crime, but she doesn't believe in telling the cops what motivated the attack. In the patriarchal world of 20th-century Japan, it's better to confess to murder than to acknowledge a rape. Just suck it up, and keep going.
By coincidence, I watched Shiori Itō's Oscar-nominated documentary Black Box Diaries before Play It Cool. When the 26-year-old Reuters intern was raped by a powerful media figure in 2015, she went straight to the police. In Japan, where 96% of rapes go unreported, this was highly unusual.
Then, when her criminal case was dismissed, she filed a civil case. All the while, she documented her eight-year ordeal, material that would form the basis of a book that became available worldwide and a documentary that still hasn't been released in Japan–even though she won her case.
Nonetheless, it sets the plot in motion. With Tomi out of the picture, Yumi needs money, so her mother's employer offers to look after her–if she takes Tomi's place as a bar hostess. It's a form of indentured servitude, because the madam paid her bail, and Yumi has to work off the debt, but much like Otsuya (the magnificent Ayako Wakao) in Masumura's 1966 revenge thriller Irezumi, she proves adept at a job she never would have chosen were circumstances not quite so dire.
If anything, it's a male fantasy for an innocent young woman to have her virginity taken by force only to turn around and become a successful sex worker, but in Masumura's pro-woman, quasi-feminist filmography, women tend to end up stronger and more independent than when they began.
That said, female solidarity proves scarce. At school, Yumi was lonely and friendless. When two classmates invite her out for drinks, she demurs that she's broke. They explain that men will pay for the drinks. That's when she says, "I hate men." To which one of them replies, dismissively, "She's being weird as usual" before leaving her alone again, naturally, at the bus stop.
So it goes with Yumi, who will meet an array of men throughout her bar gig, like the one who wants to marry her until he finds out about her mother. Another assaults her and forces her to work for him until Nozawa (Cruel Story of Youth’s Yûsuke Kawazu), a former lawyer who took the fall for a client, pays him off and recruits her for a high-class joint, marveling, "You're always so positive." Her mother warned her not to fall in love, but she can't resist the guy. He's drawn to her, too, but he's been seeing the madam.
Knowing she could use the cash, not least since she's been coercing johns to gamble for her services, Nozawa persuades her to serve as mistress for club owner Kada (Yojimbo's Kô Nishimura)--at the time, prostitution was legal, but gambling wasn't, so in addition to making her colleagues jealous, Yumi was putting the club at risk. Kada isn't a bad guy as these things go, but the arrangement ends sooner than any of them would have anticipated.
Beyond Yumi's unshakable positivity, Masumura keeps things humming with a swinging score from Kuroneko composer Hikaru Hayashi and a bevy of mod, mini-skirt outfits. Play It Cool isn't as dark as Irezumi, Red Angel, or the bonkers Blind Beast. It's more in the vein of the director's marketing satire Giants and Toys, but with less of that film's screwball energy.
Masumura had a way of shooting nudity so that you don't see much, best exemplified by abducted model Mako Midori in Blind Beast, and Atsumi often uses her arms to cover her chest, but it's one of the film's few discordant notes, because it doesn't fit her character and left me concerned for the actress, who would disappear in the 1970s. I'm not suggesting that this film had anything to do with it, but it may have been a sign that a career in motion pictures, which began in her teens, would not be for her.
Nonetheless, she's very good here. Atsumi makes Yumi into an appealing presence well worth rooting for. Much like the actress at the end of her run, she loses her naivete, but she does right by her mother and learns to look out for herself rather than to wait for a man to save her–and she won't do it through sex work, concluding that "it turns everybody into deceivers."
The way Yumi walks down the street at the end recalls Giulietta Masina's famous walk in the Fellini film. It isn't as devastating, but it's refreshing to see a 55-year-old film where a woman isn't shamed for her choices–including an abortion–and steps boldly into a future she imagines for herself.
Play It Cool is out now on a limited edition Blu-ray through Arrow Video with a commentary track from Jasper Sharp (The Midnight Eye Guide to New Japanese Film) and Anne McKnight (Nakagami, Japan: Buraku and the Writing of Ethnicity) and a video essay from Mark Roberts (Masumura Yasuzô and the Cinema of Social Consciousness). Images from YouTube / Daeie (Mari Atsumi), the IMDb (Atsumi pictured with Akemi Negishi, Ryôichi Tamagawa, and Yûsuke Kawazu), and Documentary Campus (Shiori Itō).
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