Black Rose Ascension

Weirdly funny and hopelessly sad.

A gem in the history of Japanese Pinku Eiga and one of Tatsumi Kumashiro's best.

A tragedy of an unsuccessful director who never would stop chasing his dream of porno films, however unfortunately let down time and time again by people around him -- something I believe is exactly the reflection of Tatsumi Kumashiro himself.

The editing of sound and montages are very intriguing and imaginative, all nicely and smoothly blended into the black humorous feel of sadness of this wonderful film.

All of the actors and actresses in this film are talented; all of them did very good to diliver a general feeling mixed of helpless boredom and ignorant discommunication by their decent and responsible performances.

There is a very interesting scene in the beginning where the director(the character) walks the actress (the character) in the zoo and tries to enlighten or kinda persuade her into another porno. They are walking vertically backwards towards a group of elementary school pupils when suddenly an oldman flashed across the camera intentionally, finally the director managed to talk the actress into what the actress clearly lacked interests in front of the cages of giraffes when they'd walked past the group of pupils. Try get a vision of the image: oldman - grownup - children - giraffes (the grownup were misled backwardly to degenerate into animals). Tatsumi Kumashiro obviously use this peculiar setting to mock porno films in a unique sarcastic way, even though a PORNO is exactly what he was making, which is very cool to me.