Fay ce que voudras (2000)

This film is a dive into the infinitely small, a night district of tiny bars lost in Tokyo, zooming in en the lives of four characters: Tanko-san, a bar owner in her fifties, Oba-san, 78, Miyuki, a 50-year-old transvestite, and Ako-chan, a hostess in her forties. Golden Gai, east of Shinjuku station in Tokvo has survived half a century: the shoddy houses built there on ruins after the war started to harbor an unofficial prostitution district. It evolved later on into a cultural village, a Mecca for young intellectuals and would-be artists in the seventies. In the eighties, the Golden Gai district weathered the Bubble era, when speculators vied for tiny pieces of land priced at astronomical sums and would have been doomed for destruction, were it not for the bursting of the bubble. The nineties brought relief and crisis. A tone of nostalgia has set in, those who have stayed have aged, a few artists still wander from bar to bar.