The film was shot and completed during and released in the start of Ai, a timid year-old college student in Tokyo , works as a prostitute for an exclusive escort agency that caters to wealthy, perverted men. Ai visits a fortune-teller who advises her to find a "pink stone", and then fashion it into a ring.
The fortune teller also advises Ai to put a telephone directory under her television, and to avoid a gallery in the east. When she later loses the ring she risks her life to recover it. Ai shows an emotional connection to one of her clients, another sex worker who is a female dominant and who Ai clearly admires. She confides to this client that she has unrequited love for the gallery artist, and Ai's client tells her that she must live life to the fullest otherwise she will be filled with regrets.
She tells Ai that she must confront this part of her life then she can move forward as her future will be hers. Taking the advice of her female client, and an unidentified drug which her client gave her to provide her with the courage of lions, she becomes dangerously inebriated and fails in an attempt to meet her ex lover.
She is rescued from the police by one of the artist's neighbors who is said to have once been a great singer but is now crazy. This woman met Ai only a few minutes earlier and told her that she used to be friends with the Gallery artist but it is over and that she considers Ai to be her "best friend".
Throughout the film, Ai's movements have been timid and stiff and her posture demure. After the credits there is a sequence of her dancing on stage boldly and fluidly thus finalizing her growth in to her new future. The film was banned by the Ontario Film Review Board. David Cronenberg protested the board's decision stating that "even by their own rules, which they invented, it's clearly acceptable". Contents move to sidebar hide. Article Talk. Read Edit View history. Tools Tools.
