Sexy Line

The last of the four installments in the Line series directed by Ishii Teruo, Sexy Line is a street-level view of the Tokyo underworld, circa 1961, with all its hookers, johns, cops and crooks on full display. Rejecting the sterility of the studio, Ishii and cameraman Noboru Yoshida went out into the streets of Ginza and Asakusa - then two of the liveliest entertainment districts in Tokyo - to shoot on the fly, without bothering to get permission from the authorities or control the milling crowds. But for all its cinéma verité touches, Sexy Line is closer in spirit to the caper films of Hollywood, with their snappy dialogue and clockwork plots, than the experiments of the French New Wave. Everything, from the chases to the hand gestures, is smoothly choreographed and set to Hiraoka Seiji’s infectious jazz score. At the same time, Ishii is not simply aping Hollywood codes, but playfully interpreting them in the contemporary Tokyo context. Mayumi (Mihara Yoko), Ishii’s pickpocket heroine, may have learned how to snap her fingers and wink from Hollywood B movies, but she is still very much a Japanese girl of her time, with a toughness and insouciance bred in postwar chaos and poverty. At the beginning of the film she picks the pocket of Yoshioka (Yoshida Teruo), a junior manager, and gets him into trouble with the police. He is soon released, but when he returns to work, his boss, Morikawa (Kokonoe Keiji), orders his transfer to the Osaka office - an apparent punishment for his brush with the law. Unbeknownst to Yoshioka, his girlfriend Reiko (Sanjo Mako), a company typist, earns extra cash as a call girl - and one of her clients is Morikawa. When Reiko turns up dead - best not say how - Yoshioka set out to find her killer, with the unexpected aid of Mayumi. The target of their investigation is a club that runs the call girl ring. The club’s front: “members’ only” drawing classes, whose nude models are merchandise on display. Its managers: gangsters who will stop at nothing to protect their business. Playing Yoshioka and Mayumi, Yoshida Teruo and Mihara Yoko follow the usual arc of couples in Hollywood caper movies; starting as enemies, they become allies and finally something more. Ishii, however, sends them to corners of sex industry that the Hollywood of the time would have never dared to explore, including an S&M show that prefigured Ishii’s later “ero guro” work. Rather than heavy-breathing, however, the film’s overall tone is saucy and buoyant, a reflection of a country and culture then surging from its postwar twilight into a new era of prosperity, freedom - and license.