A Taxing Woman's Return

After the enormously popular A Taxing Woman, Japanese director Juzo Itami went to the well one more time, and has dished up a satisfying, if not quite as winning, sequel. This time around the plucky tax inspector Ryoko Itakura (Nobuko Miyamoto, Itami's real life wife) sets her sights on a fundamentalist religion whose High Matriarch sports Russian sable fur coats, and whose Chief Elder is in the real estate business, or more accurately the eviction business. He hires thugs to "persuade" a group of high rise dwellers to sell, in order to make a killing on the sale of the lucrative property. The plot is complex to the point of befuddlement, and entirely too much time is given over to its snaky development, but this is offset somewhat by Itami's biting satiric treatment of modern Japan's love affair with money. And although Ryoko is onscreen far less than in the original, she still has the tenacity of a pit bull when it comes to exposing tax evaders. Once she targets the religious group as a potential fraud operation, there is little question that Ryoko will not only get her man--but also break every rule, and adopt any measure to do so. It is this freewheeling interpretation of overarching duty that makes Ryoko such a loveable heroine and A Taxing Woman's Return a fun, if lesser, Itami film. Recommended. (R. Pitman)