DocFest: <i>The Great Happiness Space: Tales of an Osaka Love Thief</i>

There's a subculture of women in Japan who go bonkers for dudes with the Ziggy Stardust look. Or at least that's what we concluded after we saw the West Coast premiere of The Great Happiness Space: Tale of an Osaka Love Thief (GHSTOLT) at the Women's Building on Saturday. Those dudes have some freaking crazy hairdos! Imagine a mullet mated with a peacock and gave birth to a Las Vegas showgirl head-dress. Really we were so fixated on the hair that it took us a while to settle down and we couldn't tell you what happened during the first 15 minutes of the documentary.

GHSTOLT goes inside a popular "host boy café" in Japan to examine the lives of both the patrons and the employees. Think of these cafes as kind of like strip clubs but the roles are reversed so instead of scantily clad women, it's overly groomed boys with glam-rock hair who work there and instead of selling lap-dances, they're selling romance. What's surprising is how similar the two really are.

By contributing SFist MiHi Ahn

The women occasionally want sex but what they really want is all that girly stuff; to be understood, to be held, paid attention to and teased and petted and appreciated. The number one host-boy (and café proprietor) is 22 year old Issei. During a good month he makes $50,000 mostly by getting his clients to buy $250-$5,000 bottles of champagne which he persuades them to do by flirting outrageously, making them feel competitive with other women, telling them they're pretty and roughhousing with them the way your best-friends cute older brother might have flirted with you in high school. It seems deceptively simple to get clients to drop $1,000 a night and he cranks out the sales--even if selling bottles of champagne means he has to chug it himself, barf it up and ask for another one. So who are these sugar mamas who fall in love with these host boys and are they really so naïve that they think these boys will fall in love with them? At first we thought, these women were trapped in a serious case of arrested development, and then (spoiler alert) we learn these women aren't just dumb Doras reliving some adolescent fantasy, they're pros. They go to the host boy cafes after a hard day of blow-jobs and gonking logs to indulge what feels for them like real intimacy.

Issei and his brethren seem to callously use this knowledge to squeeze every penny from these working girls who profess their love for their host boys but before you fret for these hookers who just need hug, GHSTOLT reveals that these women hop from host boy club to host boy club finding a boy to fall in love with each time. It left us thinking that maybe the pimps are right; don't hate the player, hate the game.