A TAXING WOMAN Movie Review

Marusa No Onna

On the heels of the popular domestic success of Japanese director Juzo Itami's first two films, The Funeral and Tampopo, Itami turned his attention to the very real and very hot topic of tax evasion in Japan. In his smartly comic “issue film,” A Taxing Woman, the crooked boss of a chain of quick-turnover “love hotels” is successfully escaping the tentacles of the government's tax laws until he meets the tax bureau's secret weapon: an ingenious and infinitely resourceful female tax collector named Ryoko (Nobuko Miyamoto, the star of Tampopo). Half James Bond and half super—girl scout, Ryoko goes about her job with the hilariously single-minded, unstoppable determination of “the Terminator.” Itami uses the classic gambit of mutual respect between a thief and his pursuer, as in pictures like The Fugitive and Heat; Ryoko's methods draw admiration from the gangster even while his elaborate money-laundering schemes force Ryoko to think like a thief. Some American critics dissed A Taxing Woman for being a bit flabbier in the middle than Itami's tight earlier films (it is looser, though no less focused), yet I found the sheer audacity of the tax-shunning schemes (based on reality, we're told), together with the sweetly militaristic, crackerjack comic performance from Miyamoto (Mrs. Itami) to be enormous, richly rewarding fun.

NEXT STOP … A Taxing Woman's Return, Tampopo, Minbo

1987 127m/C JP Nobuko Miyamoto, Tsutomu Yamazaki, Hideo Murota, Shuji Otaki; D: Juzo Itami; W: Juzo Itami; C: Yonezo Maeda; M: Toshiyuki Honda. VHS, LV FXL, LUM, FCT