Billed as a comedy but plays out more like a comedic drama, with a lot less laughs than I imagine director Kei Morikaw was hoping for, Makeup Room fails to shine as a film that portrays the behind the scenes actions of the Japanese porn industry.
The Makeup Room sees the makeup artist (Morita Aki) arrive at the beginning of the day for a shoot, where everything seems to be going wrong. She’s meant to have an assistant who never seems to show up and with these no shows, constant setbacks and nervous actresses, it seems to be up to the makeup artist to be the eye of the storm, keeping everyone calm, in check, and smoothing things over. As the lead we’d expect to learn a little more about her, but nothing comes, she just seems to be there talking to directors, assistant, other various crew members as well as being the mother hen to the actresses she applies make-up to, all without having any real charisma as a character.
Set exclusively in the makeup room behind the scenes of a porn shoot, Morikaw uses his previous knowledge as a adult-film director to apply it to his new film, but it just feels like it chunders on for far too long before the film’s real laughs come and no real punches about the adult-film industry are ever thrown. Instead of sharpness, what we get are just stereotypical assumptions about how these characters might be feeling about being adult-film stars.
Makeup Room supposedly boasts an array of real life stars of the Japanese porn industry, but that means nothing when the film itself fails to do anything significant or impactful as a story and, ultimately, for the most part anyway, fails at being a comedy, instead becoming quite a full affair that can’t end soon enough.
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