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Tokyo,shortly after Word War II: In the bombed out city, poverty rules,
& the best ways to escape poverty are hustling, pimping or simple
thieving. So Maya (Yumiko Nogawa), an innocent young girl with little
more than the cloths on her body, soon sees herself forced to sell her
body, & is taken up by O Sen (Satoko Kasai), a prostitute who with her
colleagues O Mino (Kayo Matsuo), O Roku (Tamiko Ishii) & Machiko
(Misako Tominaga) has put up shop in a bombed out house, wheere they
receive their clients & are able to take care of one another without
needing a pimp who would take most of their money away. Their only rulle
is, never doing a man for free, who ever does it is severely tortured as
punishment. Out of necessity, Maya soon adapts to the lifestyle pretty
well ... only Machiko, it seems, has difficulties being a whore, as she
seems herself as something better than the others, dreams of one day
becoming a respectable wife, & has clearly fallen in love with one of
her regular customers. The rest of the girls promptly fall for Shintaro
(Jo Shishido), a brutish ex-soldier & criminal, who seeks (&
finds) shelter & a hideout in their bombed out place after he has
stolen penicilin & killed a GI. Of course as soon as the man is here
it's just a matter of time until tensions begin to show, especially since
they all want him, & sooner or later one of them will break the rule
of no fucking for free ... 'The first who breaks that rule though is
Machiko, & not with Shintaro but with her favourite customer, &
she is severely whipped & beaten up, the other girls would even have
killed her wouldn'T Shintaro have interfered. Machiko is then cast out,
but before long, she meets Shintaro again & learns that he is not at
all - as she suspected - in league with the girls but rather detests them,
but needs their pace as a hide-out. As a sort of revenge, Machiko seduces
Shintaro ... Later, Shintaro has a party with his 4 prostitutes, &
somehow all of them want to seduce him, but in the end, only Maya is able
to (the others are too drunk).The next morning though, O Sen secretly
overhears a conversation between Maya & Shintaro, where he tells her
he will make a getaway that afternoon & agrees to take her with him
... so O Sen betrays him to the police (& he is shot eventually) while
Maya is severely tortured for having fucked him for free ... When she
finally arrives at her meeting point with Shintaro, Maya naturally doesn't
find him, only a Japanese flag, swimming in the sewers ... Despite
its sombre topic & the dramatic story it tells, Gate of Flesh is
a remarkably entertaining film: It manages to tell its story about sex
& violence borne out of necessity without preaching, every now &
again interrupting the plot by light, even amusing scenes. Perfect use is
made of colour as well as the bombed out city-sets (that have an almost
expressionist quality) to emphasize on the plots underlying meanings - but
without being too obvious, but at the same time without playing them down
or denying them.
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