Ai (Miho Nikaido) is a twenty-two-year-old call girl who specialises in sadomasochism by night, by day she's studying sign language so she can work with deaf kids - but which gives her the most satisfaction? For example, she can be tied to a reclining chair by a man who blindfolds her against her wishes and injects her with an unidentified drug and still get paid for it, and Ai's personality confusion sees no problem with that. Perhaps the reason she puts herself in such situations is that she's ended a relationship with a top TV star and still may not have recovered from the experience. Perhaps not.
And perhaps writer and director Ryu Murakami, the author of Audition, thought this adaptation of his own book would be saying something daring about life in the nineteen-nineties, but after watching it you may be hard presssed to tell exactly what it is. Tokyo Decadence is so determinedly inscrutable that it's not the unusual sequences featuring Ai's clients that are fetishised so much as her blank character and the glossy surroundings of high rise apartments and gleaming Japanese architecture. Essentially it's one of those studies of modern alienation that features "shock" effects, adding a sensational aspect to prevent its audience dropping off halfway through.
We know that Ai is a superstitious sort because she seeks advice from a fortune teller, advice she follows to the letter including placing a telephone directory under her television set. Another thing she does is buy an expensive topaz ring - the original title of the film is Topâzu - which she manages to lose during one of her sessions with a self-confessed perverted businessman (one of many dodgy geezers herein) and sure enough she does seem to encounter a measure of bad luck afterwards. She has to return to the apartment of the businessman, but is foiled when she finds he and his girlfriend are tied up by gangsters.
Thrilling Tokyo Decadence is not, as although it seems happy to present its heroine in weird sexual situations they're not weird enough to linger long in the memory. We don't see anything too upsetting, maybe a spot of oddness involving a vibrator or a bowl of urine, but most of the "decadence" is implied. The trouble is, if you're wanting to see this for the racy aspects then they are not consistent and the last act is made up of Ai wandering the streets of a wealthy suburb searching for someone who lives there: the most exciting thing that happens is that she falls off a ladder. And if you're watching for an examination of what drives Ai to debase herself, not exclusively sexually either, then you're going to have to work hard for the answers and probably leave little the wiser. In fact, there's something uncomfortably simple minded about the whole enterprise. Music by Ryûichi Sakamoto.
[Arrow's Region 2 DVD has no special features, but does have subtitles that are stronger in tone than the film itself.]
