Yuriko's Aroma ユリ子のアロマ (Yuriko no aroma) [2010] • Japan

Oh, the expectations. Noriko Eguchi stars as aromatherapist Yuriko, who finds herself uncontrollably aroused by the sweaty scent of a seventeen year old boy. Oh, the possibilities. The boy happens to be the niece of the woman who owns the salon where Yuriko works. That's the story and pretty much the whole plot.

The film gives itself away early, letting on that it's going to be safe and good-humored. Oh, the let down. The moment things hint towards any tension, or that things might get sexy or erotic, the soundtrack rears its ugly head and plays goofy and light-hearted. And then the scene cuts away. The technique of cutting a scene before it finishes can be effective in moderation but here it's so overused it seems to reinforce a suspicion that the director doesn't know how to let a scene form its own conclusion. The film is sprinkled with innumerable scenes that have no beginning nor end, just a shallow, usually brief, middle period. Most of them add nothing and could have just been eliminated.

The film's runtime is only 79 minutes and it could have easily been shorter. It doesn't explore anything in any depth and there are a whole lot of scenes of "opening the door slowly, inch by inch" that could have been tightened up to make room for something else except there's nothing here. A couple off camera handjobs and an embarrassingly out of place scene with a topless air-head girl giving Yuriko a massage don't add any adult or erotic content.

I love Noriko Eguchi so I'm going to write off her Quaalude inspired performance as the result of bad direction. It's a gutsy role, in theory anyway, which calls for her to do a lot of aroused sniffing of a young boy's body and licking of his head. She does those parts very well. Few people could. Too bad they are the only interesting moments in the film.

★★

Director: Kôta Yoshida
Starring: Noriko Eguchi, Shota Sometani, Noriko Kijima, Jun Miho, Saori Hara

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There are snippets in this official trailer (which probably won't last long on YouTube because of the boobage) that aren't in the movie and the dialog is cut up and mismatched to create something that doesn't exist in the final product.