Last Updated on January 22, 2021 by rob
20 year old Yuko (Mariko Kaga), a sexually assertive good time gal from the port city of Yokohama finds herself caught between the manipulative sugar-daddy (Takeshi Katô) who wants her to sleep with an American skipper to ensure a business transaction goes through and her young best friend (Akira Nakao) who wants to make an honest woman of her.
One of Nikkatsu’s efforts to ride the New Wave with youth themed topics, this is an excellent portrait of a modern girl whose personal hangups (sex is fine but Yuko won’t let any man actually kiss her on the lips) won’t see her defeated any more than will the efforts of the men who want to control her. Neither an airhead nor an amoral schemer (ala Julie Christie’s character in Darling), Yuko’s journey from merely being sexually liberated (there’s a great scene early on in the film where she willingly strips for a group of men she’s picked up at a nightclub, intending to take them all one by one, only for her very frankness to intimidate them all into leaving!) to actually taking charge of her life works thanks to a winning performance from Mariko Kaga.
Pretty Mariko nails the pouting, pint-sized sexpot routine perfectly but also conveys a tenderness and a curiosity about life beyond the nightclub world that has us rooting for her right from the off. Ko Nakahira’s direction carefully evokes Yuko’s growing dissatisfaction with the existence she’s leading and the clever script by Sô Kuramoto and Kôichi Saitô even finds a way to elegantly incorporate Yuko’s fondness for dancing into a dockside-set finale in which she quite literally dances rings round Nakoa’s sugar-daddy turned pimp. Years ahead of anything similar coming out of America or the UK this is a gem and highly deserving of attention.
