Such a sick film...

Whenever they put S-E-X in an intellectual/artistic film, it seems to completely short-circuit many people's brains (if they have any to begin with) and they simply can't see past the S-E-X and understand what the film is really trying to say.

This is based in a Japanese novella. It's fiction. It's doubtful there are really brothels like this, and if there are, this is probably not a realistic portrayal of them. The clients are older men who are probably impotent and want to sleep next to a pretty young woman who has been drugged so she won't laugh at them, judge them, or be disgusted by them. People have weird fetishes, but I don't think ANYBODY fantasizes about being an impotent old man like this. Besides, if they were to honestly portray "normal" prostitution, a lot of young prostitutes no doubt routinely have sex with men old enough to be their fathers or (thanks to Viagra nowadays) their grandfathers. And THEY get to be awake for the experience. Is that less sick?

But the film is not really about sex. Male attraction to young women is not just pure romantic love of the real person OR a simple sexual reflex. Young women also REPRESENT something for older men, abstract things like youth or beauty, things that can't really be grasped or held on to. This is why old men who can't even get it up might still be drawn to younger women they have nothing in common with. In regular prostitution women become sex objects; in this brothel though, they are more like METAPHORS who REPRESENT something to these men besides just sex.

The book and the other adaptation of this book, the German film "The House of Sleeping Beauties" are told entirely from the perspective of the men. This is told largely from the perspective of one of the prostitutes. So even if you think the males in this are just sick and perverted rather than sad and poetic, this STILL is more about the female object of affection and how her real life and the real person is very different from the metaphoric "sleeping beauty" role she plays in the brothel, an idealized fantasy that she herself is largely oblivious to.

I'm probably wasting my time here trying to explain this to SOME people, but THAT is the real point of the movie.

agnostic pain

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It's such a curiously unsexy film that the cover image contains more eroticism than the film itself. The film is relatively mundane, not least as an 'art house' film.