A Taxing Woman

Charming little movie. The peekaboo sequence is a classic

Bland and uninspired, especially if you're comparing this to Itami's much better film Tampopo.

Good clean fun, a nifty little film where all the characters are a bit smart and a bit devious.

Watchable but long and a bit confusing for me in terms of how the tax evasion stuff actually worked.

If you only see one tax evasion comedy this year, make it this one. Itami's tax investigators are like some kind of Robin Hood SWAT team; their heroic portrayal is really delightful. Yet Itami is pretty clear in drawing parallels between the investigators' probings, and other, more distasteful sorts of personal violations (I believe Itami had some tax troubles himself). Miyamoto and Yamazaki develop a complex adversarial codependency. One of Itami's best.

The time signature in the (ridiculously ubiquitous) theme song is really neat, as is the tune's constant evolution. The film itself is nowhere near as interesting, but it's charming enough.