For the Ladies: Japanese Actors in Commercials Pt. 2

I'm not exactly focusing on actors this time per se, but now it's notable Japanese actresses that grabbed my attention. Finding commercials starring great actresses was a little trickier as they seem to be a bit more scarce, but what I could find was very interesting. Maybe the difficulty of finding commercials may be in part of the classic gender roles of what's expected of women that what's expected from men. In a country that for years was incredibly male dominated, even work in a commercial for a female may have been difficult.

Let me start this with my favorite of these commercials starring the beautiful Mariko Kaga (Pleasures of the Flesh (Etsuraku) (1965)) with her large, cartoon like eyes struggling to wake-up before goofily squeezing out White Lion toothpaste and brushing her teeth intensely. A little bit on the Richard Lester tip in humor and with the dental equivalent of A Hard Day's Night's (1964) collage shots of The Beatles:


(Uploaded onto YouTube by user Vintage50D)

Sweet Temptation: Pleasures of the Flesh (1965)

Thanks to some easy Googling, I can pinpoint the exact date I saw Nagisa Oshima's Pleasures of the Flesh (Etsuraku) (1965). It was a April 24th, 2009 and including my friend, I must have been one of only fifteen people in the theater in the enormous Egyptian Theater. I had no clue what to expect aside from what I have read about Oshima and from the brief description of the film in the American Cinematheque calender. And what I read about Oshima was always the same thing: he's the Japanese Godard (which is a very inaccurate assessment).

When I stepped out of the theater after watching the double feature of this and Japanese Summer: Double Suicide (Muri-shinju: Nihon no natsu) (1967), I was surprised enormously by both pictures, particularly PotF. I tried to watch as much Oshima as I could and read every bit of text I could find on his films, but every where I read, PotF is treated as minor Oshima. David Desser in his book Eros Plus Massacre calls it "an interesting failure" while Maureen Turim's The Films of Nagisa Oshima rarely touches upon the film, even in context of his whole career. With what little I can find about the film or what others may say, it's become one of the films I consider an underrated masterpieces.

Pleasures of the Flesh (Etsuraku) (1965) Dir. Nagisa Oshima