Starring: Haruka Ayase, Munetaka Aoki, Toru Nakamura
Director: Eiichiro Hasumi
Category: IIA (Japanese; Chinese subtitles only)
Despite its title - oppai is Japanese for breasts - what's most remarkable about Eiichiro Hasumi's film is how mundane it is. Based on a novel by Munenori Mizuno, which is allegedly based on a real-life story, Oppai Volleyball is set in 1979 and revolves around novice high-school teacher Mikako (Haruka Ayase), who is assigned to take charge of the boys' volleyball team and discovers five teenagers obsessed with the part of the female anatomy referred to by the film's title. Exasperated, Mikako pledges to do anything they want if they agree to treat their sport (volleyball playing, that is) seriously - which leads to her agreeing to show them her breasts if they win their next game.
Given the classification of the film - it's a category IIA film, which means an absence of 'nudity of a sexually suggestive manner', according to Hong Kong's censorship guidelines - that Mikako will live up to her part of the deal is out of the question. Rather than drawing out the perv in the film-goer, however, Volleyball is perhaps riveting only when one tries to figure how she's going to get out of the situation with her modesty intact - which in itself is quite a stretch of the premise over about 11/2 hours of screen time.
While it's easy to take aim at the mild chauvinism that drives the humour of the story - Mikako, for example, is asked by her principal not to 'excite' her charges, even though it's the students who make saucy jokes out of her love of a collection of poetry - Volleyball is perhaps more troubling for being a pedestrian exemplar of that dated genre known as the high-school rite-of-passage drama. The transformation of the students is just too easy: the weaklings become able players with just a few weeks of training, and their sweaty teenage sexuality (they're seen peeping into female changing rooms at the start and drooling over Mikako's physique as she does stretching exercises) is too easily shed to reveal a glowing humanity within. A subplot explaining Mikako's dedication to teaching adds tear-jerking drama and only serves to highlight the emotional manipulation that sours the whole undertaking.