The Naked Director: Japan’s porn industry gets the Netflix treatment
- The streaming service tells the unlikely story of a downtrodden encyclopaedia salesman turned adult film director
- Based on a true story, it could only be made in Japan, with its singular sexual taboos, traditions and perversions
“It seems … I have peed my pants a bit. May I take them off?” An entirely understandable reaction, too, when you’re a meek, mild and downtrodden encyclopaedia salesman (aren’t they all?) being peppered with golf balls by a yakuza to whom you’re trying to sell said reference books.
It’s a tough proving ground, but Toru Muranishi graduates from it a new man, ready to revolutionise an industry a little different to that in which he’s been scraping by: porn.
The Naked Director, now playing on Netflix, couldn’t have come from anywhere but Japan, with its singular sexual taboos, traditions and perversions. Many were overthrown or put to good use when the cuckolded and humiliated Muranishi took up his clunky video camera in the 1980s, as this based-on-a-true-story, part-biography, part-social commentary, part-tragicomedy shows.
Going into business, in the first of eight episodes, with a peeping Tom who sells smutty audio tapes, Muranishi (Takayuki Yamada) proceeds via the top shelf of a seedy bookshop at first, but soon realises that the trailblazing VHS technology is the future. The more shocking the content – and some of it here, faithful to the facts, is explicit – the bigger the profits, but also the greater the attention paid by yakuza and the police. Sex equals money, never more so than when there’s a revolution in its consumption and enjoyment going on.
“I want to sell sexual desire,” Muranishi tells his lacklustre partner, forging ahead to create a commotion in Japan’s trousers. Marvel, as his encyclopaedia-sales training comes in handy after all.
HBO’s Succession returns for a second season
Successions, as power transfers go, can be drawn-out affairs. Luckily, Succession is now teasing us through a 10-part second series on HBO and HBO Go, with its Machiavellian mischief, corporate slime and family spite all still present and correct, if not loaded on.
Deliciously sinister, Janus-faced Brian Cox, all cuddly and grandfather-ish one moment, savagely back-stabbing and denigrating the next, is the cynical embodiment of capitalist malice. As Logan Roy, he is the founder of media and entertainment conglomerate Waystar Royco. But he is also ageing and ailing, the takeover vultures are circling and his four children are jostling for control of the empire. Logan, however, is raging against the dying of the light and revels in insidiously pitting one potential successor against another, especially within the family.
The grasping, tyrannical, control-obsessed media-mogul figure may be a staple of film and television, but reminders of how personally repulsive and obnoxious such tycoons can be seldom go unappreciated.
As a megalomaniac patriarch, Cox is a sort of Scottish Robert De Niro, venom shimmering behind his eyes while the rest of him radiates bonhomie. In series one, feeble, confused, easily manipulated son Kendall (Jeremy Strong) almost helped Logan’s rivals pull off a hostile takeover of his father’s realm, before chickening out. In the second series, Logan is busy humiliating Kendall, now back in the fold, and using him against his siblings while dangling fame and fortune in front of them. And it’s odds-on that Logan will give Kendall just enough rope to hang himself, then kick out the stool from underneath him. Such is the streak of black comedy that runs through Succession.
The supporting cast – including Sarah Snook, Alan Ruck, Danny Huston, Harriet Walter and Matthew Macfadyen – constitutes a prodigiously talented backing band, but they are all playing second fiddle to the irascible, profanity-spouting Cox. Nothing succeeds like excess, and billions of dollars.
New episodes on Mondays at 9am on HBO and HBO Go, repeated at 10pm on HBO.
