GO-CON! Japanese LOVE CULTURE (2000) D: Shintani Nobuyuki. W: Yoshihiro Izumi. Satisfying comedy-drama about three single guys (Ryuta Kawabata, Ryoji Ando, Kazuhito Kozaka) who organize Go-Con parties to meet girls from a broad spectrum of Japanese life: older women, high-school girls, automatic club hostesses, bored housewives, monster chicks (homely girls so named for their lack of better things to do at Christmas) and others. Since the girls are always invited in groups of four, the boys add a fourth member to their own side of the table, always a loser to make them look better by comparison and to better their odds of getting hooked up.
Meanwhile, in the kitchen, the cooks bet on each night's proceedings, which at best lead to hurt feelings, soulless toilet sex or for the most part, going home alone. In essence, the parties supplant meaningful relationships, but as a wizened old cook points out to a waitress (herself a member of the climactic Go-Con group) at film's end, these youth have simply taken a long Japanese cultural history of arranged marriage meetings and modernized it. And like so many things in the life of a modern Japanese single, it all boils down to competition: to get into good schools, to get good jobs. After all, admits one character, 'what's the point of competing if it's not winning.'
In essence, the filmmakers are saying that modern Japanese men have lost the ability to simply ask girls out, preferring to see what gels out of a group setting, a not unfamiliar concept in many Asian cultures. True or not, its presentation here is uniquely Japanese. Despite being set largely in one room (the restaurant dining room, with occasional asides in the kitchen, the bathroom and the street) that would seem to betray the film's origins as a play (although I'm not certain), the dialogue is pretty sharp and the character dynamics are well-observed, particularly during the climactic Christmas Go-Con, in which a mousy former participant (reinvited because of her 'monster' status) brings along one guy's ex, a pretty-but-vapid bar hostess she pays to play a classmate, and one of the restaurant's waitresses, (Rina Uchiyama) who knows what pigs the guys are but secretly admires one of them. I give it an 8.
