directed by Kengo Furusawa
Japan
93 minutes
3.5 stars out of 5
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Full disclosure: I did proofreading and QC for this movie's English subtitles. I'll be going into full spoilers below.
The Japan's No. 1 [....] series was a vehicle for the inimitable Hitoshi Ueki, one of the main faces of the jazz band/performance troupe Crazy Cats, who themselves had their own long-running series of films. I do prefer films where the Cats work as an ensemble (each of them does have a role in this film, but they're pretty perfunctory; it's Ueki's world, we all just live in it) but you absolutely cannot deny the magnetic energy Ueki has, which is the driving force behind this movie. But there's a little more to it than just that, and that's why I found this one so interesting.
Ueki plays Hitoshi Hikaru (most Crazy Cats-affiliated movies have them playing characters whose names are based off of their own), a music teacher who gets fired for being too funky. Immediately afterwards, he starts a new career path: smarming his way into a door-to-door salesman gig that he uses to shake down wealthy women (and their sugar daddies) and earn himself as much money in commission as possible. As the title implies, the film itself frames Hikaru as a ladies' man, irresistible whether he wants to be or not. But, again, there's more to it than just that.
This movie does something really clever by stringing you along and making you think that Hikaru's ladies'-man act is 100% genuine. When he sings laments about how women just can't stop throwing themselves at him wherever he goes, and bemoans his status as a helplessly attractive guy, we think "yeah, yeah, he's just full of himself". But then in the last five minutes or so we realize that he was actually, literally telling the truth the entire time: he really, really did not want to be such a ladies' man.
At the climax of the film, Hikaru assembles all of his women together in one hotel room and admits to them that he's been lying to them. He has a fiancée who he deeply loves, who developed a brain tumor and had to go to America for treatment. Everything he's been doing up to then has been in service of paying off her medical debt. At no point did he actually intend to be a playboy - he was never doing any of it for his own gain. Like in every other No. 1 movie, Ueki plays Hikaru with a kind of reckless, roll-with-the-punches attitude, so we don't get to see any of what he might have been feeling inside. But the movie places hints about Hikaru's backstory right under our noses without us realizing: throughout the film, we see Hikaru pulling something out of his inner jacket pocket, but we never see what it is until the end of the film, when it's revealed that it's a picture of his fiancée.
I love a movie like this that can trick its viewers into believing one thing is happening when it's actually something else, not by explicitly lying to us, but by laying all of its cards out and making us think we're seeing something that we're not. We have all the puzzle pieces the entire time, we just don't recognize them. Everything is right there: he does not want to be a ladies' man. He just needs money. But we don't believe him, because Ueki is so charming, it's impossible to think there might be anything else there. The very last shot of the film is Hikaru crying alone in his dingy apartment with women literally beating down his door - his fiancée left him and married her surgeon - and it's hilarious, or at least it was to me, but granted I had been working on subtitles for 11 hours straight by then. (Behind-the-scenes: at one point I ate a fruit bar one-handed at my laptop so I didn't have to stop working for breakfast.)
There are some dips in quality along the way with these No. 1/Crazy Cats movies, but ones like this that are not only funny and full of talented comic actors, but also surprisingly layered - those make me want to watch every single one of the rest.
