Let it not be said that today’s nerds are indifferent to history. For the second year in a row, Fantastic Fest has set aside a portion of its program to pay tribute to classic pink films. Think of these unclassifiable softcore B movies as Japan’s answer to Roger Corman: some are schlocky fun, some are unwatchable, others are subversive works of art. And as Corman’s assembly line gave way to the 1970s American new wave, pinku has given many of Japan’s major mainstream filmmakers their start. The most notorious graduate of the pink school, at least in the States circa now, is Yojiro Takita, whose schmaltzy Departures won the Oscar earlier this year for Best Foreign Language film. The Oscar winning filmmaker is responsible for at least a dozen of the hundreds of pink films in the loose Groper Train franchise. What’s the distinguishing characteristic of a Groper Train film? According to Nadav Streett of the pink film distributor Pink Eiga, who along with Ayumu Oda and was on hand for a Fantastic Fest screening on Sunday of Takita’s 1984 Groper Train: Wedding Capriccio, “You have to have a train. And a preferably there is a pervert, who is hanging out groping women.”

Before the feature, the Pink Eiga guys presented a featurrette they produced in which actor and director Yutaka “Mr. Pink” Ikejima, who proclaims himself to be “the only director in the world who has shot over 100 films in 20 years,” describes the Groper Train allure. Commuter train groping is, says Mr. Pink, “a uniquely Japanese form of sexual harassment,” born out of the frustrations of Japanese businessment “who aren’t getting any,” packed into overcrowded cars, pressed against women, fighting the urge to let their fingers roam. Mr. Pink described “the molester hero” of classic Groper Train films as a wish-fulfilling “role model” for the male viewer: “The molester in the train is a substitute for men’s actual desires.” All was well and good as long as the films existed mostly as fantasy outlets for Japanese male repression, but over the decades women have taken a stronger role in Japanese society and have come to protest the commuters who take the Groper Train “role models” a bit too seriously, leading to the establishment of women-only cars on the trains. Then men began to complain that women were falsely calling grope, leading to further boy/girl segragation. Life has imitated art, leading to a change in the core principles of the art: now, instead making illicit but mostly hidden desires visible, the Groper Train films mirror an actual societal blight. The featurette concludes with Mr. Pink’s lament, “The end of Groper Train really makes me sad.”

“Sad” is the opposite of how Groper Train: Wedding Capriccio made me feel, which is an incredible thing to say about a film that builds a comic setpiece (set to a kazoo score, no less) around a detective dressed like a doctor, raping a train car full of strange women with a dental mirror. A giddy sex farce in which a tangle of lovers scheme to liberate a billionaire arms deal from his inheritance in the days before his death, as in many pinku films the many actual consentual sex scenes (not terribly graphic, mostly focused on heavily-make-uped female heads thrown back in ecstasy) are almost narrative elipses, bones thrown to the squares who might have an interest in conventional sex. Takita (and presumably, the Groper Train afficianado) locates far more pleasure in fetishistic, claustrophobic close-ups of skirts being lifted to reveal pantyhose seams, which then serve as a kind of veil for the groping. There is no conventional male money shot in Wedding Capriccio (there is only one shot of a penis, and it’s made to glow in the dark like a lightsaber in a laughably futile gesture towards censorship). The point of the narrative is prove that women will give themselves over to the ecstasy of the unwanted advance; the money shots are the moans arrising from the victims-turned-willing participants, to which all on the packed train other than her and her perpetrator are apparently oblivious. There is an argument to be made that this film is all about female pleasure, although you might hurt yourself going through the contortions necessary to make it.

There was an odd irony to watching the film in an environment as unwaveringly indulgent of male fantasy as Fantastic Fest, on the afternoon after Roman Polanski was arrested in Switzerland for the child rape he committed half a lifetime ago. Wedding Capriccio (and, one would assume, most Groper Train films) create in a fantasy world in which rape is not only a-ok, but fodder for comedy — a light activity. The embarrassing thing about the franchise is that some men apparently think that fantasy is real. The embarrassing thing about the Polanski case (or, at least, one of them) is that some participants/parties interested in the debauched sunshine noir that was 70s Hollywood apparently thought/still think the same.