Review: Tokyo Decadence

Text © Richard Gary / Indie Horror Films, 2022
Images from the Internet

Tokyo Decadence (aka Topâzu; Topaz)
Directed by Ryû Murakami
Cinemabrain; Melsat; Unearthed Classics; MVD Entertainment
112 minutes, 1992 / 2022
www.unearthedfilms.com
www.MVDentertainment.com

It is hard to nail this one down when it comes to categorization. Exploitation? Sexploitation? Asian Extreme Cinema? Transgressive? Well, I guess the film has its leather boot in and on all of them.

This film is infamous, and to be honest, before this, I have never seen it, so I am looking forward to catching up. Despite a penchant for vengeful ghosts, Japan genre releases are more known for violence, gangsters, and underage women and other sexual deviances (that term conditional to the individual viewer).

There are two versions of this film: the first is the U.S.-released “soft core” 92-minute version, but this is the longer, Japanese 112-minurte “harder” one, with more sado-masochism in certain scenes (neither of them is hardcore). Needless to say, the film is in Japanese with English subtitles. The director and writer, Ryû Murakami, is no stranger to over-the-top storytelling, having written the novel upon which was the foundation of Takashi Miike’s Audition (1999). This film is also based on one of his own best-selling novels.

This Japanese production was filmed in Tokyo, at a social stratum I am certain I will never achieve in my lifetime (unless there is a full Lotto in my future).

Miho Nikaido

Right off the bat, we meet a mostly nekkid and tied down Ai (Miho Nikaido) before the credits roll. She is a high-end call girl who specializes in sado-masochistic role playing for incredibly rich men, especially on the receiving end. Her exploits are shown in very loving photography and highly erotic stylings. The first half hour is dedicated to a couple of her couplings, but one really needs to be into that kind of thing for it to be effectives, but I must admit, it’s not my style, either the humiliation, the leather, nor the domination. Artistically, I can marvel at the lighting and the way the camera is used, but the action leaves me cold and – er – unresponsive. I never really understood Japanese kink.

Despite the psycho-sexual tone of the film, the story itself moves at a glacial pace, as Ai superstitiously gets advice from a medium (Yayoi Kusama), who gives her advice such as to put telephone books under her television (like to see her try that now).

Ai starts having a change of heart about her life’s work after a few clients go just a bit too far…okay, way too far, and she begins to want to get out (somewhere in my head I hear Al Pacino saying, “But they keep pulling me back in”). While she pines for an ex-lover, a well-known man (Hiroshi Mikami) who appears on television, and is now married to a famous opera singer (Chie Sema), she is also drawn to a statuesque dominatrix drug addict, Saki (Sayoko Amano).

Sayoko Amano

The camera seems to love Nikaido and shows her emotions through extremely contrasting use of light, with people wearing mostly black and white, with the background dark and the people lit sharply. But still, she looks quite beautiful even in this harshness. There is also a sharp use of the adding of the color red, used seductively, in things like shoes, nail polish, lipstick, and especially Ai’s nearly ever-present oversized handbag to hold all her sex-toy and attire accoutrements. The shots are long, following the action with relatively few edits. The scenery is also worth mentioning, as most of the first two acts is of the city at night, with incredibly tall building with industrially florescent lighting inside the structure’s windows. It feels both organic and incredibly designed at the same time. When we do see nature, usually trees, it almost seems out of place.

Ai’s journey of dealing with rich people who need her but do not really care about her, and trying to get out of the life reminds me quite a bit of the framework of the story of Bob Fosse/Neil Simon’s Sweet Charity (1968), except it’s not a musical, other than the incidental music here is by Oscar™ winner for The Last Emperor (1987), Ryuichi Sakamoto. The music is extra helpful because Ai doesn’t really have too much dialogue, relatively speaking to most of the other characters in the film, and when she does talk, often it is almost whispered. It is like she is on a boat without oars, and she just floats in the direction the waters take her.

While I found the S&M scenes cringe-worthy, for me the most uncomfortable moments were the last act, where Ai goes looking for her ex-lover, and her further humiliation on the journey itself, even before possibly meeting him, a series of bizarreness worthy of Fellini or even Philippe de Broca’s King of Hearts (1966).

The extras for this “Blu-ray Special Edition” include an English dub version for those who have an aversion to subtitles, but know that I watched the original Japanese versions with the English subtitles turned on. I did spot check in on it here and there, and the dialogue comes close to matching the subtitles, but not quite. As a non-Japanese speaker, I really cannot say which of the two is most accurate. A “Featurette” is included from when it was first released, which is an odd mix of an extended trailer that focuses on each of the actors through clips, and interviews and pieces from the film’s opening (it looks like at a festival, but it could just be a theater and the after-party. It’s in Japanese with subtitles, but that’s no surprise, I am going to surmise. Along with a “Stills Gallery,” and a nice box slip-cover, there are trailers that include a bunch of Unearthed Classic releases, and two different versions of the one for Tokyo Decadence: from Japan and Germany.

I can certainly understand why this is considered a classic: the beautiful way it is shot, its languid style among the brutality, and the story arc, almost like an opera, but I will not be revisiting it, honestly.

IMBD Listing HERE