 Dir: Ryu Murakami, 1992, Japan, 112 mins, Japanese with subtitles
Cast: Miho Nikaido, Sayoko Amano, Tenmei Kano, Kan Mikami
Tokyo Decadence follows Ai (Nikaido), a submissive, beautiful hooker who, while plying her trade, suffers abuse at the hands of Japanese salary-men and Yakuza types. Heartbroken after the marriage of her ex-boyfriend, she's doesn’t like her job and isn’t good at it or very suited for it. All kinds of drugs are present — cocaine, crack, heroin, ecstasy — and Ai is dragged into this world by a fellow prostitute just before she goes to seek out her ex-lover. Tokyo Decadence falls into the category of ‘Exploitative Cinema’; independently produced, low budget, this film in parts serves largely as a vehicle for scenes of explicit BDSM (bondage discipline, sadomasochism). This is to BDSM as Takashi Miike’s Itchi the Killer (2001) is to violence.
The film looks a little dated, not helped by the appalling soundtrack that flips between a horrible synthesizer tune to cool rock, but is timeless in its efforts to explore the seedy side of sexuality. In fact, the first hour of the film is almost entirely Ai’s work with her clients; these BDSM scenes are an unflinching depiction of people playing out there fantasies, yet are tedious and at times overacted. We are subjected to Ai squirming her way through graphic, sexually explicit scenes with the only explanation to why she is a prostitute — apart from a monetary one — being that she is broken-hearted. Because none of Ali’s humiliation and trauma is given a reasonable context to explain why such a meekish young girl would be in such unsuitable profession, the first half of Tokyo Decadence is more pornography than art. Though the best exploitation cinema walks a fine and precarious line between pornography and art, when it’s done well no one claims the end result is pornography, àla Russ Meyer. The BDSM scenes are very graphic and aren’t for the fainthearted, but they won’t shock as much as maybe they did ten years ago, a time before the curiosity satisfying internet was as ubiquitous as it is now.
The film changes gear in the second hour and follows Ai’s quest to confront her ex-lover, which is where the Tokyo Decadence gets interesting. Swapping the dirty glamour of the city for the contained cleanliness of the suburbs, Ai wanders the streets in a fashion reminiscent of Ellen Burstyn’s drugged out comatose walk in the subway in REQUIEM FOR A DREAM (2000), and finds out that her celebrity ex-lover and his wife’s life isn’t turning out so great either. The following scenes are dreamlike and melancholic and carry a weight brought about from the trauma Ai experienced as a prostitute in the first half. But the trudge through the first hour of endless sex scenes just isn’t worth the payoff of a second half that is a quite moving depiction of a woman truly lost.
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