DOOR 2: Tokyo Diary 
ドア 2 「DOA 2」
Release Date: April 25th, 1991
Duration: 82 mins.
Director: Banmei Takahashi
Writer: Toshiyuki Mizutani (Screenplay),
Starring: Chikako Aoyama, Joe Yamanaka, Shingo Kazami, Chiharu Iwamoto, Yukino Hida, Ren Osugi, Keiko Takahashi,
Banmei Takahashi’s Door 2: Tokyo Diary was the second film in the Door trilogy and the final one directed by him. It was released on VHS in 1991 but the film was “lost” due to the bankruptcy of the Director’s Company, the short-lived production house that made a diverse range of horror, drama, and erotic content in the 80s and 90s. When the prints for a number of films were rediscovered, they received digital remasters and these remasters have been released theatrically. Door II was let loose in Japanese cinemas at the end of March 2023. It now finds its way onto home format release courtesy of Third Window Films’ Blu-ray of Door where it is included as an extra.
Quite a generous extra since this is a strong film in and of itself.
These are the words Ai (Chikako Aoyama) states at the start of Door II: Tokyo Diary. She is a college student who moonlights as a call girl. She is the subject of a psycho-sexual character study that is played breezily but, by the end of proceedings, it leaves a viewer feeling bleak. It could be described as a psychological horror movie as director Banmei Takahashi pushes Ai through violent and sadistic experiences and doesn’t flinch in showing them.
The story watches her work as she operates solo, choosing her clients based on her feelings. Every job involves a lot of risk as Ai does not have a handler to help her should anything go wrong and she daringly services people who want something extreme. Thus, when she engages in sexually pleasing a person, peril is always a possibility.
While this is a return to Takahashi’s pink film roots as it comes complete with the expected soft core scenes of breast licking and fondling of areolas, do not expect anything sexy as the escalation of emotional and physical troubles, terrors, and torture Ai experiences ensures an atmosphere of despair sets in deeply during and between everyone ejaculating. This emotion erases any erotic pleasure a non-S&M inclined viewer might have. Sex here is political rather than pornographic. What lurks behind each encounter is a pointed look at class and sexual relations.
In a typical pink film way, to insert a layer of social commentary onto a skin flick, the film is using extreme sex to look at alienation and nihilism. These feelings were a pervasive element of Japanese films of the 90s and 2000s as the economic bubble burst and social relations broke down. The film’s class critique/psychological aspect comes from witnessing a parade of bubble economy babies with lots of money use and abuse Ai’s body. This includes a man cosplaying as a Nazi and engaging in bondage play and an art dealer who trades in forgeries as well as genuine works of art and applies his controlling and obfuscating nature in a series of physical and emotional mind-games that manipulate Ai and another woman.
Each client is wealthy and emotionally dead. Their materialism is evident but they seem only able to get emotional highs through the sexual degradation of women and themselves. Most disturbing is an aggressively terrifying sequence where Ai and another call girl, her friend Tomoyo, are dominated and cut up by a scissor-wielding rockabilly who takes sadistic pleasure in their fear. The scene stands out thematically and artistically due to the execution as the actors and Takahashi squeeze out so many shades of fear through a torturous slowness and silence in atmosphere and through close-ups of blade on flesh and on horrified female faces contrasted with the deep concentration and satisfaction that the male client gets lost in.
Relations between the sexes are definitely not okay here.
As for the women, the screenplay positions them as believing they are performing an act of self-exploration and self-sacrifice for society through sex. Indeed, Ai turns down an easy life with a sugar daddy simply because she wants sexual gratification. On its face, it seems like an act of defiance from an independent woman but the filmmaker’s knowingly strip that notion away with shots of her humiliated, broken, and bruised and questioning what she is doing and never convincingly resolving it. Audiences may feel sympathy but one senses through her uncertain stares direct to camera that Ai would reject that sentiment as she misguidedly tries to deal with the alienation that she reveals throughout the film through extreme sex.
As repellent as these ideas can be, the visual compositions throughout the movie are always eye catching or just plain nice to look at and remind a viewer that this is art rather than just pornography. One particular visually interesting scene, Ai’s climax at the opera, reminded me of the artificial theatricality of a Seijun Suzuki film like Tokyo Drifter (1966) with its bold use of colours on stark white backgrounds. There is also the visual motif of water deluging Ai as rainstorms pour on her and she swims in pools and Tokyo Bay. This is a connection to the vast ocean of sexual appetites she is plunges into through her work and it adds a visual poetry to make bearable a bleak and pessimistic view of sexual relations between the genders.
In some ways this film reminded me of Lars von Trier’s Breaking the Waves (1996), another story with a woman’s sexual debasement, just without any of the religious interrogation/uplift. Instead, here, we see cold hard capitalism and the men who swim around in the upper levels of it manipulate and torture lost women into submission. While this may not be a film a person would want in their collection, it definitely justifies its existence with ideas and visuals that demand audiences watch it all of the way through as they imbibe that 90s sense of disillusionment felt by people just as the economy went sour.