

Review:
Can a gritty, no-exit gangster movie brimming with hardcore sex and degradation also be a tender love story filled with poetic dialogue and an experimental arthouse feature? The answer, of course, is no, but Tokyo Elegy, from South African underground filmmaker Ian Kerkhof, swings for the fences in its effort to stitch all of those elements together in its 90-minute running time. And while the end result is frequently confusing and more than a little pretentious, it’s never boring.
Dutch actor Thom Hoffman (Dogville) plays Jack, a criminal on the lam after killing a pair of cops. He runs into porn actress Keiko (played by real-life Japanese porn star Mai Hoshino) in a bar, and after banging her brains out in the bathroom (a poster for Kerkhof’s film Wasted! adorns one wall), he moves into her apartment to hide out. The pair quickly falls into a round-the-clock routine of drugs and fucking, but the romance has a time limit; Jack has apparently ratted out a former partner, and the local yakuza plan to settle the score within seven days. As his final days slowly wind down, Jack attempts to do good by helping Keiko deal with her childhood memories of sexual abuse.