Despite the efforts of psychoanalysis, sexuality remains a topic that appears erased within the societal field. Of course, such kind of societal repression is followed by a bursting forth of sexuality from the cracks of the societal field – i.e. the blossoming of pornography and the birth of red-light districts.
Tokitoshi Shiota, long-time actor, critic, programmer, aims to reduce the societally-imposed dismissal from the art of stripping with his directorial debut. His debut is beautifully brought to life with cinematographer Akiko Ashizawa and enriched by the performances of veteran directors Ryuichi Hiroki and Takashi Miike.
Ririka Of The Star tells the story of Moe (Mito Kana), who affront her father (Ryuichi Hiroki) on her eighteenth birthday by telling him that she will become a stripper rather than a nurse. At night, Moe suddenly asks her father about her mother Nobuko and is shocked to learn that she was an actress in Japanese soft-erotic films who abandoned her and her father soon after she was born.
Tokitoshi Shiota’s narrative evokes a variety of questions for the spectator to ponder over: What kind of satisfaction does the stripper get from being ravished by the eye and the fantasy of the male Other? What can seduce a subject to utilize one’s moving body to tease and please the male gaze? How does such desire to undress blossom?
While Shiota does not provide an answer to all these questions with his short narrative, he does enable the spectator to understand Moe’s sudden subjective shift. In Moe’s case, the dream to become a stripper blossomed by the uncalculated confrontation with a female ideal-image. The performance of Ririka Komuro (played by Ririka Komuro) on Youtube offered, beyond any kind of seduction whatsoever, a glance at what a woman (sexually) is. It is our assumption that Moe finds in this performance the first fragment of the riddle of womanhood that has plagued her since her adolescence. Moe wants to abandon her previous desire to become a nurse because, for her, it does not provide an answer to the riddle that confuses her, but imposes a patriarchal solution that silences the riddle of womanhood all together.
Moe, however, does not want to pursue her true desire without her father’s consent. Yet, what kind of confrontation can chance Moe’s father’s fixation on his daughter becoming a nurse and allow her to take her own path of femininity?
The composition of Ririka Of The Star is mostly static with a few dynamic shots thrown into the mix. While there are pleasing shot-compositions to be noted, the main source of the spectator’s visual pleasure is Shiota’s appealing use of film-grain and soft naturalistic but quite striking colour-schemes.
Yet, what makes Ririka Of The Star truly stand out is Shiota’s daring choice to craft a silent movie. With all the acoustic excess in cinema, it is quite an estranging experience to have to read intertitles. Yet, Shiota does not merely rely on silence to be special and eccentric, but smartly exploits the dimension of sound and music to emphasize the beauty of the stripping subject and heighten the subjective impact of naked dancing body.
Ririka Of The Star is an experimental short film that delivers. While Shiota’s decision to make a silent film could have been a gimmick, his thoughtful manipulation of the dimension of sound and music results in a narrative that does not merely emphasize the beauty of moving female body, but reveals that such beauty can change subjects.
psychocinema 