Xeni Jardin at BoingBoing has a fascinating entry on a documentary called The Great Happiness Space: Tales of an Osaka Love Thief. I don’t know how I managed to make it this long completely unaware of this film, as it played about 100 festivals last year and was even nominated for a Gotham Award for Best Undistributed Film (it lost to Steve Barron’s Choking Man). Regardless: the film is about Japanese “host clubs”, which, as Xeni puts it, are home to “sharp-dressed, good-looking 20something guys who are paid to make women feel loved. No, not to perform sex acts, but to feel cared for.”

The fact that there’s a need for this kind of thing in contemporary Japan seems to be in line with a lot of issues explored in a documentary that I *have* seen, Mike Mills’ Does Your Soul Have a Cold? That film, which explores the relatively recent explosion of anti-depressant use in Japan, is essentially a verite examination of loneliness and sadness. Great Happiness seems to take a more stylized approach to describing similar problems.

As far as I can tell, Great Happiness is still without a distributor, but the entire film is available for viewing on Google Video. I’ve also embedded the trailer above.