Driven by Uncontrollable Passions A TAXING WOMAN
By RICHARD SCHICKEL
Her freckles are utterly disarming. She enhances their effect by wearing her hair in a girlish bob. Her round brown eyes seem to be perpetually widened in astonishment at the inventiveness that people lavish on wicked enterprises. In short, Ryoko Itakura (Nobuko Miyamoto) does not fit anyone's image of a tax collector. But in her case, appearances are usefully deceptive. They camouflage a spirit demonically dedicated to exposing the cheating heart of the all-too-typical taxpayer.
Hideki Gondo (Tsutomu Yamazaki) is her dark double, a crippled, spidery man whose vast real estate portfolio includes a chain of notorious hot-sheet hotels. Gondo's outward manner vividly contrasts with Ryoko's. He too has a childish air about him, but it is the air of a spoiled child. Abruptly cruel and totally selfish, he is as maniacally dedicated to tax avoidance as she is to tax compliance. She may spare a moment from investigative accountancy for compassion (directed at his troubled teenage son). He may digress from getting and hoarding to express a possibly authentic romantic longing (directed at her). But fundamentally they are both driven by passions that are beyond rational analysis or control.
Except by Juzo Itami, a filmmaker to whom obsession is character, the source of everything that is interesting and wacko in human behavior. In last year's Tampopo he genially satirized the spiritual contortions people will undergo when gripped by a fervor for haute cuisine. In A Taxing Woman his subjects are relentless greed and implacable righteousness, and his mood is, appropriately, much darker.
As before, he is rigorously informative about the hard, occasionally grotesque labors that disproportionate passions demand of their victims. If you thought you learned more than you needed to know about the creation of the perfect noodle soup in Tampopo, you may now feel you are finding out more than you require about tax law and outlawry in contemporary Japan. But arcana have their own peculiar charms -- and their special usefulness in Itami's larger design. When his single-minded characters are thwarted in the pursuit of their hearts' odd desires, they have a tendency to burst into sudden, angry flame. And to elicit hysterical responses from bystanders astounded when a quiet oddball turns into a bright-burning fireball.
In Tampopo the amount of unpredictably bad behavior occasioned by the pursuit of a great recipe was funny and surreal. In A Taxing Woman, where the subject is money, these outbursts are more shocking than risible, especially when Ryoko's revenue-agent colleagues eventually stage a mass raid on Gondo's home and demonstrate they are every bit as mad in their pursuit of justice as he is in defense of miserliness.
With this film, Itami is less a knockabout ironist, more a sly cinematic Dostoyevsky. The clues to this secret identity lie in his sudden alternations of mood between quiet and noisy desperation, his fascination with the moral force of the holy fool -- the part the director's graceful wife Miyamoto is essentially playing -- and, above all, his allusions to Crime and Punishment. As in the great novel, it is a tenacious detective's patience that forces the final confession a criminal requires for his soul's peace. But the entertaining dexterity with which Itami plays this potentially heavy hand is all his own, and strangely beguiling. He collects our interest, but charges no penalties.