14 December 2017

Tokyo Decadence (Japan, 1992)

A submissive hooker goes about her trade, suffering abuse at the hands of Japanese salarymen and Yakuza types. She's unhappy about her work, and is apparently trying to find some sort of appeasement for the fact that her lover has married.

I get the feeling that Tokyo Decadence (a.k.a. Topaz) is like an adult version of 50 Shades of Grey (2015), a little more dark and disturbing and a little less aimed at horny teens. It's a tad long, and has lengthy erotic scenes, but in my opinion it never ventures into sleazy softcore porn (which it has been classified as at some other websites). The underlying sadness and morally twisted characters elevates it to something else, and the melancholy score covers the whole film in a bleak veil. Not a whole lot of enjoyment for our precious characters, but I often like these sort of dark films. Worth mentioning is that the film is based on a book written by Ryu Murakami who also wrote Audition, which also got a film adaptation by Takashi Miike. 


Genre: Drama

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