Films about the Life hardly portray reality. Confectionary heart-of-gold fairytales such as Irma la Douce and Zorba the Greeek, or The World of Suzie Wong and high-end heart-of-gold Klute certainly don't. The female players in some rougher spaghetti Westerns and Fort Apache, the Bronx are only incidental, though the occasional real nasty violence is there. Witty kinkiness is what some remember of Belle de Jour, just plain messy kink what remains after Crimes of Passion. The recent On_Line emphasizes sordid cybertech rather than pross, and of the underage Taxi Driver  runaways, audiences reacted most strongly to thirteen-year-old Jodie Foster's Fourteenth Street Iris. 

Veteran director Masato Harada's Bounce Ko Gals centers on events during twenty-four hours in the Tokyo Shibuya section, where secondary schoolers moonlight as call girls. To eclectic music (including what can only be described as Japanese reggae) and the occasional break dance number, the girls are sadly juvenile in school uniforms as they discuss name-brands and makeup in the same breath as money, speed, abortions -- and fat old men who groped them on public transport and now pay cold cash for their favors.

Without even the standard wisdom of fake working names, the teens evidence not the faintest qualms about their lives, so desperate are they to escape home and parents. Nor, truth to tell, are they particularly anxious to accumulate wealth, either, as large sums are casually dropped on frivolities and McDonald's or in effect given away to acquaintances. The overriding concern, aside from hanging out and giggling, in fact, is often to avoid providing the "services" paid for, by first rolling the johns who will then shun the publicity that reporting them would entail.

How true this unsettling picture may be to current Japanese urban life -- and American, as well -- is beyond the province here, but it is noteworthy that almost no character in this film is upset by this ubiquitous street hustling, open child prostitution and pornography. Parents are nonexistent, officialdom venally blind, and everyone out for the Almighty Yen.

The few exceptions are those who have experienced most and are themselves up to the neck in the corrupt exploitative system. In a burusera (fetish shop) attractive Saki (Kaori Momoi) deals in the girls' stained underthings and uniforms but nevertheless is sane and honest; like punk "street talent scout" pimp Sapp (Jun Murakami), she would seem to promise moral objectivity but disappears from view for too long. Only Oshima (Koji Yakusho) is left, despite an ominous entrance: a Yakuza-connected B-girl club owner with a daughter in grade one, he is paternal by contrast. Last season it was destitute farm girls who cut into business, and this year well-off teenage call girls must be warned away with his threats of "social cleansing," hopefully without violence.

Working part-time in a shop, Lisa Togo (Yukiko Okamoto) has saved up and bought a return ticket to New York City, "no place to be broke" and where she once lived. Hoping to fatten her remaining bankroll, the day prior to the flight she sells her clothing and agrees to participate in a non-graphic schoolgirl video for the sex market. During filming, however, her U.S. and Japanese passports are stolen, along with an ID and cash. Although rescued physically by Sapp, she is disconsolate and is befriended by two teen call girls who will initiate her into the easy-money Game.

Non-erotic, the film is unpleasant in what it does show. Alongside Japan's Lolita complex, loli-con, for instance, there is the government man who demonstrates unique latrine-cleaning techniques, or the eighty-year-old ex-professor indignant at being classified a war criminal for World War II sex experiments on Korean, Dutch and Indonesian prostitutes. Lisa objects to crumbs dropped on a carpet, but her two friends Jonko (Hitomi Sato) and Raku (Yasue Sato) nonchalantly use dangerous stun guns and a third will lose an eye after an intended client-victim savagely beats her.

Most unpalatable is the total amorality of the girls themselves. They have no vision apart from the drifting moment, no desires beyond the purely material, and no feelings that are not superficial in the extreme.

Mid-level mobster Oshima realizes the hollowness of it all. Returning, actually padding, Lisa's stolen money over the objections of his vicious deadpan hatchet man, he moralizes that in the end the whole business is just a transferring of bribes from one corruption to another. The angelic-faced sixteen-year-old, for her part, says she has learned the drawbacks of greed in the excess, which got her into all this trouble.

As the airport train pulls out, her two friends cry. Talent scout Sapp has already bought her uniform, in hopes that she will soon return to fill it. But Lisa will never look back. This world is not one of relationships but of survival in the moment. No laws, no codes, with brutality more likely than any random gesture of kindness. Bounce Ko Gals tells a straightforward story, straightforwardly, with a couple of puns but no frills, no moral. Often angled up- or downwards for distortion, Harada's passive cameraeye is nonjudgmental on this slice of unpleasant lives. Nothing admirable here, no good people, no point. 

(Released by EDKO Film Ltd.; not rated by MPAA.)