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Soap Girl
Soap Girl is a 2002 drama film directed by Young Man Kang, a Korean-born filmmaker who made his U.S. directing debut with Cupid's Mistake. PlotA seemingly innocent woman becomes involved in the netherworld of massage parlors in this drama. Maya (Kerry Liu) is a young East Asian woman who arrives one day at a seedy massage parlor in a run-down neighborhood in Los Angeles. Dressed in shabby clothes and speaking in broken English, she asks Mamasan (Tomiko Lee),[1] who runs the parlor, for a job, and Mamasan immediately puts the attractive Maya on staff. While obviously new to the world of "shower and massage" - which is about sex rather than physical therapy - Maya soon becomes one of the most popular women working the parlor, and she soon bonds with her co-workers, including the thick-skinned Asia (Gina Hiraizumi), vulnerable Yuko (Mari Tanaka), practical Jenna (Hiromi Nishiyama), and self-centered Sammy (Kate Holliday). Maya also gets to know Harry (Luciano Saber), a freelance writer and would-be poet who at the age of thirty has yet to lose his virginity. As he stops in for the occasional "massage," Maya and the painfully shy Harry find themselves developing a very non-businesslike infatuation for one another, and as she confronts her growing love for Harry, Maya must come to terms with the secret that brought her to the parlor in the first place. Production and releaseThe story was pitched to Director Kang, [which was] basically an intense, disturbing dark comedy about hijinks at a massage parlor involving geeky male virgins, gangsters and immigrants.
"So the story evolved away from the "Pretty Woman/Cinderella" story and into one that plays on the audience's expectations of Asian stereotypes. Maya turns out not to be an immigrant, though everyone in the beginning believes that she is. None of the massage girls are naive, innocent lambs with hearts of gold; [they] are simply trying to survive." Awards and honors
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