Gushing Prayer: A 15-Year-Old Prostitute [Masao Adachi, 1971]:
Despite its sensationalist title and its status as a "pink film," or "Pinku eiga" - which Wikipedia defines, in its broadest sense, as any Japanese theatrical film that includes nudity (hence 'pink') or deals with sexual content - there is very little to writer and director Masao Adachi's work here that could be referred to as titillating or salacious. Sex scenes are fittingly joyless, with the framing of shots and the use of stylization often reducing characters to vague, disembodied objects, whose acts of coitus are soundtracked by recitals of suicide notes.
Like the films of Teruo Ishii and Kōji Wakamatsu, the intention here is provocation, and while the subject matter might lend itself to charges of exploitation and the "male gaze," the aim of the film is as much political as anything else. A close contemporary point of reference to Adachi's film might be something like Lars von Trier's Nymphomaniac, Volumes I and II (2013), where the story is both one of self-reflection and sexual identity, as well as an aesthetic and thematic statement against the themes of convention and conformity.
