When it comes to the Procedural genre of film, generally these works tend to put their focus on law enforcement – cops and robbers, literally. However, the cops the generally don’t cover are ones who deel with what are considered more “boring” crimes – white collar financial crimes. Smuggling is sexy, robbers are sexy, gangsters are sexy. Tax fraud is still sexy… except people stealing from workers by not properly paying taxes, people stealing from the community by not paying taxes to pay for the services the government provides that they use are still robbers. So, it’s up to a more financial cop to catch them – one like the protagonist of A Taxing Woman.
A Taxing Woman follows auditor Ry?ko Itakura (Nobuko Miyamoto). In the course of her general job, she comes across a Love Hotel. Noticing the number of rooms in the building and the number of very nice cars outside, she checks the numbers in the office, discovers something doesn’t add up, and asks the boss for permission to investigate. Her investigation will put her in conflict with the Yakuza and institutional misogyny, in addition to engaging in a battle of wits against the owner of these hotels, Hideki Gond? (Tsutomu Yamazaki).
You would think it’d be tricky to make a financial investigation exciting. You’d be wrong. Part of that is helped by the fact that the Yakuza have been firmly entrenched in the real estate sector for decades, since after the war (if not before). Part of that is that the director, the late Juzo Itami, does a tremendous job of making following the money visually engaging.
It helps that there are precedents for this – All The President’s Men is a film about interviewing people, reading documentation, and following the money. While that also had the advantage of building off then-recent events in the form of the Watergate scandal, and the significant of those events still are relevant in modern politics. However, if the act of making the investigation – of reading all those files, of making all those phone calls, wasn’t interesting, then the movie would fail. The same applies to A Taxing Woman.
Miyamoto’s performance as Itakura, and Yamazaki’s performance as Gond? also help carry the film. Yamazaki’s antagonist is charming, but he’s also a scumbag, and that combination helps make him interesting. Itakura is also a clever and perceptive investigator, and which helps draw you in to the investigation, and with it makes you root for the tax investigators.
In all, I came out of this film not only enjoying this film, but wishing we just had more series about investigating tax fraud. I wanted to go from this watching a J-Drama or a Dick Wolf procedural series all about following IRS investigators looking into big-money tax fraud.
You can find where to stream A Taxing Woman through JustWatch. It has not received a physical release in the US yet.
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