Door / Door 2 (1988/1991): the high art of gut-level sleaze (Review)

What kind of films would be produced by a production house called the Directors Company? In a Western context, you could hazard a guess: serious-minded auteur films, unblemished by the crudities of genre, devoted to an artist’s personal vision. The Directors Company that existed in Japan from 1982 to 1992 – and which is celebrated in a new series of Blu-Ray reissues by Third Window Films – has some commonalities with this approach. It specialised in finding young directors and giving them a place to develop their style outside of the studio system, the kind of haven any country’s industry would benefit from. It also produced films with titles like Kandagawa Pervert Wars.

Except anyone with even a passing familiarity with post-war Japanese cinema knows that part of its strength lies in ignoring the boundaries between high art and low trash. Kandagawa Pervert Wars wasn’t just a quickie “pink film”, it was an early credit for the Cannes-darling director Kiyoshi Kurosawa, who continues to hop between genre thrills and chamber dramas to this day. If Banmei Takahashi, director of the two films on the disc under review here, isn’t as garlanded, it’s not through any lack of ambition. Third Window are promoting 1988’s Door as Japan’s first giallo; it is all that and more.

The first thing you notice about Door is how effortlessly it bottles that moment when Japan, in the eyes of the wider world, stopped being a vanquished empire and started to look like the future. Its housewife heroine Yasuko, played by the elegant, fraught Keiko Takahashi, is beset by nuisance callers; one tries to sell something to her by saying she’s been chosen to receive this offer by a computer. Even today, when all the technology depicted in these films is visibly out of date, there is something almost science-fictional about the reverence the film’s characters show to modernity, to the digital, to the ideal of a more advanced, orderly future. Technological utopias are, in SF, often vulnerable to attack by old, atavistic forces. Yasuko is about to find out that this is just as true of late ’80s Japan.

Among the endless array of unsolicited telephone callers and door knockers that Door presents as an inevitable consequence of modern life, one becomes dangerously fixated on Yasuko. For a while, she can fend him off, helped immeasurably by the fact that Door is one of those rare movies where someone’s front door cannot be taken down with one well-aimed kick. This salesman, though, is even more persistent than most. The final act of Door is breathtakingly full-on, including a rare sighting of Chekhov’s chainsaw and blessed with a snaking overhead tracking shot that flies over all the rooms of Yasuko’s apartment like Emmanuel Lubezki remaking the end of Taxi Driver. The preceding two acts could be described as a slow burn, except that makes it sound like the tension isn’t absolutely relentless when it clearly is. Barring one too-silly moment involving a rollerskate, it’s something close to the perfect stalker thriller.

The question of whether it’s appropriate to make a popcorn thriller out of something as dismayingly common as stalking is one each viewer will have their own answer to. I found that my objections melted away in the face of how extraordinarily good Door is, but there’s a tendency to defend female-led exploitation movies as secretly feminist and empowering. I’m not sure I can do that for Takahashi’s film. There is definitely a taste of the erotic thriller commingling with the film’s giallo and slasher influences, which does succeed in making Door feel more dangerous and destabilising. It’s a taste that becomes the whole meal with 1991’s Door 2: Tokyo Diary. Door 2 has some vestigial thriller elements but it’s mostly a pink film, a genre of Japanese exploitation film that – outside revisionist works like Shinya Tsukamoto’s A Snake of June – has never appealed to this writer. Unexpectedly, it might be even better than the first film.

Door 2 stars Chikako Aoyama, best-known for her lead role in the staggeringly silly Hong Kong Category III film Robotrix, as Ai, a call girl drifting from client to client. This is far from untrodden territory in sexploitation cinema; indeed, it’s this episodic structure that makes it hard to take the likes of Emmanuelle seriously, since no matter what the heroine goes through she must always jump into the next adventure as if nothing has happened. It may be that screenwriter Toshiyuzi Mizutani has taken this as his jumping-off point, as Door 2 seems focused on answering the question of what kind of person could thrive in this kind of rootless, risky lifestyle. Ai sees her fellow sex workers drift in and out of that life, even sees some permanently damaged by their experiences. Yet she remains steadfast, refusing to look back, an attitude that variously appears laudably resilient and dangerously blasé about the many traumatic situations she encounters.

It’s equally possible that Mizutani, author of Apartment Wife ’98 Dangerous Ecstasy and Raped With Eyes: Daydream, doesn’t give a sh*t about any of that and has just grabbed the first story structure that allows him to string a load of sex scenes together. If that’s the case, then the movie’s strength and insight – and it does have both – must be ascribed to Aoyama’s committed performance and Takahashi’s audacious tonal shifts. There are moments in Door 2 which are, against the odds, genuinely sexy; there are also moments that are terrifying, and nauseating, and at least one which I don’t want to describe in this review in case it gets the site taken down under whatever this week’s version of the Online Harms Bill is. There is a closing speech in which Ai describes what she’s gained from her life as an escort, where it is almost impossible to work out if she’s deluded or clear-headed, or whether the tone is bitterly ironic or heart-on-sleeve sincere. It is rich in atmosphere, gorgeously directed and as vivid a snapshot of late 20th century Japan as Door was. It is also gut-level sleaze designed to thrill a terminally horny audience. Like Ai, it can be anything to any customer. It demands a leap of faith in order to take it seriously, but it is a leap worth making.

You might be wondering: what do Door and Door 2 have in common, other than a director and a company? The answer is not much, which is oddly refreshing in these days of franchise overload. Takahashi and the Directors Company are the brands, and they’re the focus of the disc’s well-chosen extras, including an interview with the man himself and a history of the Directors Company from Jasper Sharp (who also provides a commentary on Door). I’d also like to venture another, strictly thematic, connection. Both Door and Door 2 are films about how our relationships can be changed by technology, how it can enable sexuality – particularly of the voyeuristic kind – and give us new status symbols. They’re also about the threat of technology, how it can be used to invade other people’s lives at a distance, or how it can simply make us lonelier and more alienated. They are, in short, films about the internet made before the internet existed, and this prescience alone justifies Third Window’s decision to revive them.

Graham’s Archive: Door / Door 2