Pain

Rating: * * * *
Director: Masato Ishioka
Running time: 114 minutes
Language: Japanese
Showing until Dec. 7th at Box Higashi Nakano

"You oughta be in show business, baby!" That's been a pickup line of "producers" since the days of D.W. Griffith, though in Japan today the pick-up artists are likely to be young men with stylishly coiffed, tea-colored hair, tanned pretty-boy faces and dressed in dark designer mufti. They prowl places like Shibuya, Harajuku and Ikebukuro, hitting on one woman after another with a coaxing, teasing, wheedling urgency.

News photoHideo Nakaizumi and Miku Matsumoto in "Pain"