About Love, Tokyo

A scummy, indefensible picture from a once-important director. Yanagimachi's weakness has always been his uncritical fetishisation of macho bad boys, from the bike gang in Black Emperor to the murderous lumberjack in Fire Festival; his heroes this time are mainland Chinese students in Tokyo's answer to Stepney, and he sees them (with only a figleaf of detachment) as amoral, foul-mouthed misogynists slipping easily into the city's underworld of crime, gambling, violence and commercial sex. Whatever his intentions, the view of immigrant behaviour and attitudes chimes neatly with the prejudices of the Japanese Right; so it's fortunate that the visual style is as squalid as the screenplay, making the film a completely repulsive experience.