MIFF Session 9: THE WIFE OF A SPY

Yusaku, a merchant from Kobe, travels to Manchuria in 1940 on business and returns a little strange. His wife suspects an affair which seems borne out in the weave of details she picks up. A childhood friend of both of them has militarised himself into martinet stiffness. A well liked employee of Yusaku announces at a business lunch that he is quitting to write a novel of the times before embarking on a personal adventure. The woman Satoko suspects is Yasuku's mistress is fished out of the harbour. At an interrogatve dinner between Satoko and Yasuku the latter is caught in a lie. It's Hitchcock world.

Kyoshi Kurosawa has long abandoned the strange horror movies he was so good at. Any genre fan who lucked on to Kairo or Cure was spellbound by their navigation into uncharted territory where they looked alien to even the oddest J-horror that was then being created around them. And then at some point in the mid-2000s he stopped. Not filmmaking, he stopped horror. It's as though he knew he'd not only made effective scares but scares unlike any before or since. The job had been done. But the movies he started making instead were troubling. Bright Future was an odd youth culture story. Retribution was a successful if bewildering attempt at a non-scary ghost story. Loft was an all out parody of J-horror that didn't quite get when it had to be scary and when to be funny. Doppelganger started like one of his horrors but soon clunked down into an embarrassing attempt at satire. And so on. I've had the blu-ray of Real for years but have never finished it. So, why this one?

I wanted to be able to push myself into the experience, to use the quasi formality of a home screening of his new film just to see if there was anything in it. Well, there is.

Japanese cinema's relations with Japan's wartime past have been varied. From aftershock fables like Shindo's Children of Hiroshima to gritty and grim war films like Fires on the Plain among a swathe of cinema that referred to the effects of war or the imagery of atomic bomb clouds and catastrophes. Very few have used the war crimes committed in the Manchurian occupation which in the public eye plunged the Japanese war effort into the depths of inhumanity alongside the Holocaust in the west. This is the cloud that hangs over the tale of Wife of a Spy and Kurosawa has brought all of the strengths from his horror movie to what mostly looks like a drawing room drama. While there is some dread on screen this influence is in the constant unease in the relationship between husband and wife and the loyalties each might have to the circles of concern around them (nation, expansion, business, war effort etc.). This might seem over dramatised until you see the stakes each character is playing with. A scene of torture shown only from behind but clear from the actions of the torturers and sounds and its resonance does a lot of work.

The rest is nuance: glances, gestures, a chess board with an unfinished game. You won't find car chases or explosions here but the threat to life, the devauling of life as the war machine hums up to full roar and the final chances to act as normal people diminish into the dark spread in plain sight. Kyoshi Kurosawa never left and didn't always win when he tried but this is a pleasant treat for the patient among us. Is it Hitchcock? No but it doesn't need to be.