Topaz / Tokyo Decadence (1992) review

Name! That! Paraphilia! High-priced call girl Ai (Miho Nikaido, better known as Mrs. Hal Hartley) mourns her break-up with a musician while going out on 'dates' with a variety of insanely rich creeps, who have too much money and too much imagination (I can't imagine guys who work in retail blowing thousands on hiring women to crawl around in all fours with a vibrator lodged inside them). The attempt by the end of the movie for novelist Murakami to 'explore' the Ai character's depression (or any larger political commentary) is a bit too-little, too-late, as his sexual/psychic energy is almost completely wrapped up in the intricacies of the various perversions - it's at the conclusion that he figures he should worry less about his main character peeing in a fruit bowl and more on what's going on in her head. Murakami's literary works are seriously guilty pleasures of mine, but he is unable to properly bring out the characters on screen the way he's usually able to on the page - I think it's the case of a writer stymied by 'language' of the moving image. This is also one of the rare Ryuichi Sakamoto 'scores' that I think actually detracts from the picture.