Underwater Love

Everything goes rather swimmingly in the life of 35-year-old Asuka, as she works at a fish factory and plans to marry her boss. One day, though, she meets Kappa, a creature out of the depths of Japanese mythology, inhabiting the lake and looking like a hybrid of man and turtle. She will soon realize that this particular Kappa is the reincarnation of Aoki, her high school boyfriend, who drowned at 17. Asuka initially will hide Aoki from her family and her fiancé; what will follow is a strange and impressive spectacle of music, love and sex. In a special pioneering mix of the musical genre with soft porn, “Underwater Love” is perhaps this year’s most significant film belonging in the exclusively Japanese ‘pinku eiga’ film genre. An idiosyncratic creation with an independent mentality production-wise, plenty of eroticism and eccentric choreographies, Sinji Imaoka’s new creation, shot by Christopher Doyle (cinematographer on “In the mood for love”) is the romantic and, at the same time, erotic midnight delight of the year.

Underwater Love A Pink Musical by NyxtesPremieras

Original Title: Onna No Kappa

Director: Shinji Imaoka

Screenwriter: Shinji Imaoka, Fumio Moriya

DoP: Christopher Doyle

Music: Stereo Total

Editor: Richard Chew

Principal Cast: Sawa Masaki, Yoshiro Umezawa, Mutsuo Yoshioka, Emi Nishimura, Ai Narita

Country: Germany, Japan

Year: 2011

Running Time: 87'

Language: Japanese