Ìý User Rating 
"Tokyo Decadence" sums up this film precisely. It’s about a hooker who satisfies a range of increasingly perverted clients, and it’s set in Tokyo. And, er, that’s it. Almost entirely free of context or comment, it’s like watching a grim, sordid and in fact rather dull porno flick, where the director documents the sexual demands of a number of ‘imaginative’ businessmen and then – unlike the prostitute herself – does nothing with them.
And so this episodic plod (rendered even more so by the almost entire absence of drama) begins with an obsessive tough-nut who freely comments on "those sluts who screw at college", while trussing up the poor girl in S&M gear. All this before he sticks a needle in her thigh. We then move to a smart hotel suite where a tycoon, who enjoys reducing her to slave-status by piling on humiliation, insists that she repeatedly remove her knickers. A silent clown who revels in domination, an idiotic chatterbox with his heart set on strangulation, and a wine connoisseur with a taste for necrophilia complete the set.
There are many good films about decadence (after all a natural source of drama), but this is an example which is limp throughout. Doesn’t director Ryu Murakami realise that a film on this subject cannot simply be built around endless illustration? His way of pulling "Tokyo Decadence" out of its one-dimensional groove should have been to fatten up the central character, the young prostitute, who simply has to look anxious, forlorn, depressed or lost. To register all this requires her to move her face from semi-sad to completely sad and back again. In fact for much of the time it’s difficult to believe that this wisp of a girl, so innocent and unworldly, would have immersed herself in prostitution at all. Why is she doing it? Does she like sleazy businessmen? Has she a taste for bondage? Did she wander on to the wrong film set? Sadly, just like the film itself, she says nothing at all.
