'A Taxing Woman's Return' : By Hal Hinson Washington Post Staff Writer November 15, 1989

Director: Juzo Itami Cast: Nobuko Miyamoto Under 17 restricted Compare prices for this movie Find local video stores More movie shopping Save money with NextCard Visa

Enter Ryoko Itakura (Nobuko Miyamoto), intrepid tax inspector, star character of Juzo Itami's "A Taxing Woman" and now featured player in the director's sequel, "A Taxing Woman's Return." Ryoko is a pint-size sleuth, with a raccoon's mask of freckles, who'll do anything -- climb across rooftops, stage a stakeout or go undercover -- to ferret out frauds and tax crooks. Her target this time is Chief Elder Onizawa (Rentaro Mikuni), the robustly corrupt leader of a religion called Heaven's Path that rakes in billions and billions of yen every year, all tax-exempt. In making this second visit to the epidemic problem of tax evasion in his homeland, Itami seems to have wanted to up the ante. He wants to show how pervasive this evil has become, how far down it reaches. In doing so he has created a plot that involves a vast building project, land speculation, murder and political payoffs. But his satiric grasp is uncertain this time out. The film wavers between comedy and something like a serious expose , and he is anything but subtle in his condemnation of the money-grabbers and his belief in the righteousness of the tax police.

It's far from satisfying to see Itami, the hedonistic director of "Tampopo," cast himself in the role of moral enforcer. In this context, the Dionysian abandon of that earlier film seems itself to be a kind of fraud. In his rush to unveil the spiritual bankruptcy of the tax evaders, he's revealed himself as a sanctimonious prig.

Added to this, the film's narrative is diffuse and uninvolving. On her own, Ryoko isn't a terribly engaging character. She's one-dimensional -- the director's crusading stand-in. (She is, in fact, his wife.) Even so, she's the only anchor we have, and she makes only a fleeting appearance in the film's first half while the director clumsily introduces other minor characters and proceeds in his desultory manner to set up his story.

Through all this, only Mikuni holds our interest. Suavely confident in his elegant plaids, his character is a gorgeous, rotting monster with a sure-fire racket. And Mikuni gives his dissolution a touch of regality. Facing down a muckraking journalist who stands in the way of an enormous real estate scam, he wears the placid calm of a man who understands the power of evil and knows he holds the winning hand.

The story's outlines have a distinctly familiar ring. When Kinu (Haruko Kato), the religion's Holy Matriarch, brags about wearing her full-length Russian sable coat to fix a flat tire, images of Imelda and Tammy Faye flood into our heads. And in moments -- like one in which Onizawa confronts his persecutors by suggesting that they want to reduce Japan to a second-rate power, underlining his point by banging his head violently against the wall -- the traces of a great theme emerge.

Most often, though, Itami seems content merely to catch the wrongdoers with their fiscal pants down. His ability to empathize with the lusty appetites of his villains has deserted him here. And without it, his satire becomes a droning bore.

A Taxing Woman's Return is rated R.

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