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It all starts very innocently: Office worker Yoshioka bumps into lovely
Mayumi (Yoko Mihara), they exchange a few words, then she dashes off - and
then Yoshioka is arrested, and a wallet that's not his is found with him.
His own wallet however on the other hand is gone. The whole thing is
cleared up eventually, Mayumi is a pickpocket, and on the run from the
police she just passed her most recent loot (and therefore) evidence on to
the next guy she bumped into, in hopes to throw the authorities off her
scent - and successfully so. His recent arrest though creates problems
at Yoshioka's work: Sure, nobody believes he's a pickpocket for a moment,
but with even the shadow of a doubt looming, his bosses think it's best to
transfer him to another branche - which would mean move hundreds of miles
away ... in a mere couple of days. Yoshioka resents that. Yoshioka's
girlfriend Reiko promises to fix things for him. She's a mere typist at
the company, below Yoshioka in hierarchy, but she seems to be on good
terms with the company's bosses - and why wouldn't she be, she might be
just a little typist, and a lousy one at that, but actually she's a whore,
rented out from the high class exclusive call girl agency she's working
at. A night with Reiko soon convinces Yoshioka's boss not to transfer
him ... but then Reiko makes the mistake of telling her agency she wants
out - and she's promptly killed for that. Yoshioka finds her dead body -
and makes the mistake of running away, which immediately turns him into
suspect number one, especially since his fingerprints are found at her
place. Then though, Yoshioka runs into Mayumi, and she promises to help
him out of his mix-up, if just for the thrills. Of course, now neither
Yoshioka nor Mayumi know Reiko was actually a whore, but they slowly
uncover it, and soon, Mayumi finds herself working at Reiko's agency while
Yoshioka pretends to be a customer. But the whole thing turns out to be
less and less fun by the minute, as the guys who run the agency are rather
protective of their interests, and they are very ruthless, too, so
eventually, Yoshioka and Mayumi are tied to chairs in the basement
awaiting their execution - when eventually the police arrives to raid the
place, called onto the scene by a paperplane Mayumi shot out her window at
the brothel hours earlier to call for help, a paperplane that fell into
the hands of a kid first who played with it for hours before handing it to
someone in authority. Of course, everything ends happily, and in the
end, Yoshioka and Mayumi become a couple. Typical crime
thriller from Teruo Ishii's early days: It's light-footed and well-paced,
at times it''s reminiscent of American film noir, and it touches upon some
seedy subjects to titilate the audience but is as elegantly directed as
its low budget allows. That said, this movie isn't exactly a classic, and
it's not one of Ishii's more important movies - in fact you will probably
have forgotten it in a mere couple of days -, it's just good genre
entertainment, and there's nothing wrong with that.
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