It's a study of not-blood-related incest. Should you bang your stepbrother? Would that even be wrong? Does it become wrong if you think it is? What if your parents are returning from their second-marriage honeymoon and you hear them walk through the front door, so any minute they'll enter the living room and see the two of you naked and shagging on the floor... but you choose to continue anyway?
The film's first half-hour is dull and annoying. Makoto (actor: Mutsuo Yoshioka) and Yuka (actress: Ai Sayama) are about to become siblings. His mother will marry her father. Unfortunately: (a) Makoto and Yuka fancy each other, perhaps taking after their parents, and (b) they're being weird about that. Makoto sneaks into the bathroom to look at Yuka's knickers in the clothes basket while she's in the shower. He eats her leftover breakfast, but licks it first. Also, he's trying hard to backpedal in his sexual relationship with his private tutor, Eriko, saying things like, "Sensei, could we please just do regular teaching today?" (He knows Yuka's in the house, but he doesn't know she's in his closet and that she'll watch them shag.) Meanwhile, Yuka's having displacement sex with a crass classmate she dislikes, then with a complete stranger she propositions in the park.
Theoretically, that's interesting. Makoto and Yuka need help. (Even Eriko diagnoses what's going on and does her limited best.) However, the teens were all too charmless and uninteresting for me to give a damn about. The only thing you might look at twice is Ai Sayama's cup size.
The film then surprised me by switching to a different pair of step-siblings with the hots for each other. These substitute protagonists are more mature, but equally messed up. Extreme tactics are chosen for getting together, while the storyline includes rape, a road accident and getting crippled. This is attention-grabbing and it's much harder to guess what might happen next, so for the first time I got interested in the film.
We then return to Makoto and Yuka. Their earlier misadventures had been unlikeable and predictable, but at last their story's started going somewhere. Things are advancing. They discuss their relationship and hit each other. "Do you regret it?"
To be honest, incest plots have a default template and can get a bit dull. Relatives fancy each other but know it's wrong, angst angst angst, etc. This film falls into that trap for a while, albeit in its own nasty, dirty, deliberately off-putting ways... but that second couple made the story far more interesting and took us in unpredictable, alarming directions. Daisuke Yamanouchi has things to say about tiresome, crass schoolboys. There's no blood-related incest, but that doesn't affect what the film's saying about sexual desire and the twisted things we might do when we believe our desires to be wrong. (Acceptance is a big thing here too.) This is still an exploitation skin flick with porn stars, admittedly, but it's also a twisted double romance that's doing far more with these themes than a lot of better-known examples I could name. It deserves respect. Don't expect to enjoy it, though.
