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.

Their latest recruit is Matsuko (Maki Isonishi), whom Mana first spots trying to steal a half-price onigiri (rice ball) at a supermarket. Although the older woman is suicidal when they first meet, she quickly rises up the tea-girl rankings, while cultivating a maternal relationship with her new boss (whose own mother, now terminally ill, has never forgiven her daughter’s choice of vocation).

The sex lives of elders don’t feature much in movies, perhaps for the same reason that people prefer not to imagine their parents getting it on. While never gratuitous, “Tea Friends” depicts its senior-citizen liaisons with unblushing candor and a decidedly sex-positive slant. The film dares to suggest that a call-girl service for lonely retirees may not be such a bad thing. It would make a good double bill with Chie Hayakawa’s “Plan 75” (2022), a more somber indictment of Japan’s treatment of the elderly, with which it shares a belief in the importance of community.