In Japan, it’s long been understood that an invitation to tea may entail something rather more substantial than a hot beverage. So when an innocuous advert appears in the newspaper soliciting “Tea Friends,” in Bunji Sotoyama’s film of the same name, the elderly men who answer it have a good idea what to expect even before their new female acquaintance slips a couple of Viagra across the table.
After an exchange of cash and a trip to a nearby love hotel, the customer goes home satisfied and his mature companion heads off to her next appointment. Some would call it a prostitution racket, but the mastermind behind the operation, former sex worker Mana (Rei Okamoto), prefers to describe her enterprise in more aspirational terms: “We’re a community safety net,” she declares. “Let’s create a new normal.”
It sounds like a breathtakingly cynical pitch, but she seems to mean it. Mana runs her business out of a communal home where energetic young staffers mingle with the older “tea girls,” in a familial atmosphere that’s like an NGO crossed with “Terrace House.” Nobody seems troubled by the legal or ethical implications of what they’re doing: They have the cheerfulness and self-assurance of religious cultists.
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