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![Tokyo Decadence [DVD]](http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/512Z-cVS8FL._SL160_.jpg)
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This is amazing,
This is an amazing vision of life among outcasts, prostitutes and the mentally ill against a straitlaced Japanese background. Anyone who has read Ryu Murakami’s novels, like Coin Locker Babies and Pierced, will experience a deep satisfaction with this, his only film. Occasionally completely insane, mostly a very beautiful and measured and even haunting character study of a call girl and her daily grind. Great music by Sakamoto, and I often thought of the film AUDITION, which is based on one of his book. This movie is just as beautiful, and just as anti-socially disturbing.
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|Enjoyable Japanese Eroticism,
The first half is about a shy young woman who makes her money doing whatever her clients desire. It’s interesting and well acted. It’s also very sexy. The Japanese make great films about desire, human passions, one might say ‘perversions’. Half way through however the female lead goes on a quest to find her long lost love after taking LSD or something similar. Everything gets very confusing and she seems to become involved with a collection of lunatics in a park. I had no idea what was going on. The subtitles were only partial so they didn’t help. Despite this I’d recommend Tokyo Decadence for the sensitivity of the acting and the interesting portrayal of a call girl by the lead.
A theme within the narrative is about the reasons people end up in this business: ‘I had no talent for anything’, she tells one client.
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|art versus closed minds,
Ryu Murakami has written several books that I have found very useful in trying to understand the mental focus of the 9-5 type individual in a strongly regimented society like Japan,and by extension,my own..(Western..I call no country home..Born NZ,off th’rails UK,other things here + there..))The thing about Tokyo Decadence,is that the director has NOT pandered to the average ‘porn’ watcher’s expectations..That’s not what the book’s about nor is it what the film’s about.I was taken in for the 1st 45 minutes or so,by the straight forward depiction of the ‘heroine’s job,as she switches herself off in order to ‘get the job done’.All well and good,and I would have thought ‘yeah,life study,one persons ways of copimg.’ But the 2nd half of the film changes pace so noticeably that it elevates the film to an existentialist view of where we all stand in rtelation to the society around us.Where Takashi Miike used Murakami’s work to show inability to cope with the degradation of life(Audition),here there is NO ‘finish’,or coup de grace..life just goes on..as does the viewer’s after the film ends.
Anyone who buys this film expecting ‘porn’ is just as blind as anyone who find’s themself offended by the deadpan handling of the subject matter.
A perfectly made window into a short space of another’s life. Bravo.
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