Games aka Play / 遊び / Asobi (1971)

 Obscure Japanese Film #6

Based on a short story by Akiyuki Nosaka[1], Asobi tells the story of a 16-year-old girl who meets an 18-year-old boy by chance and falls in love for the first time. However, this is a Yasujiro Masumura film – his last for Daiei before the studio went bankrupt – so it’s by no means as sweet as it sounds. The main story takes place over a period of around 24 hours, but is repeatedly interrupted by abrupt flashbacks, some of which shine a light on the girl’s past and others on the boy’s. She has just finished high school and gone straight into a poorly-paid factory job but is considering going to work as a bar hostess to earn more. Her father is an abusive alcoholic, her sister is sick and confined to her bed, and her mother persistently asks her for money. The boy’s mother (Kurosawa favourite Akemi Negishi) is another alcoholic; he’s fallen in with some extremely nasty yakuza who use him to deceive young girls into going to a hotel where they will be drugged, raped and photographed for pornographic pictures. There is some tension in the story as we wait to see whether the boy will leave the girl in the hands of these creeps.

Unfortunately, what could have been quite a moving tale failed to work for me for a number of reasons. The colour cinemascope photography and editing are very well-executed as one would expect from Masumura, but I never believed that these characters were real people. Despite a good performance by Keiko Takahashi, the girl seems naïve to an absurd degree, while debut actor Masaaki Daimon as the boy – who tries desperately to appear older and tougher than he is – shouts every line of dialogue at the top of his voice, even during a visit to the cinema! Daimon is by no means a bad actor, but I felt that Masumura should have asked him to dial it down a bit. These two characters make a tiresome pair and things are not helped by the over-the-top portrayals of the many sleazy characters who surround them. There’s a high slap-count characteristic of Japanese films of this era (especially those of Masumura), and every slap sounds like a whiplash hitting sheet metal, while the score by Takeo Watanabe sounds like something from an Italian giallo. 

The film was likely intended mainly as a vehicle for Keiko Takahashi, Daiei’s controversial young star who had made her debut appearing nude at the age of 15 in the 1970 film High School Student Blues. Altogether, it’s an uneasy combination of sex, violence and sentimentality that fails to gel.

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[1] Nosaka also wrote Grave of the Fireflies, as well as the novel upon which Shohei Imamura’s The Pornographers was based.

Two Wives / 妻二人 / Tsuma futari (1967)

Obscure Japanese Film #5

In the 16^th of their 20 films together, Yasuzo Masumura directs star Ayako Wakao in a contemporary romantic crime drama closely based on a 1955 novel by Patrick Quentin entitled The Man with Two Wives.[1]  The screenplay is by the prolific Kaneto Shindo, best-known in the West as the writer-director of Onibaba (1964). Apart from the Japanese setting, the main difference between the book and the film is that the former is a whodunit, whereas in the film the identity of the guilty party is never a mystery. Although Wakao is excellent as always, in truth she is somewhat miscast as the character she plays is supposed to be dowdy and Wakao, of course, is the antithesis of that particular quality.

The film opens with Kenzo (Koji Takahashi) running into his old flame Junko (Mariko Okada) one night and finding her down on her luck and shacked up with the sleazy Kobayashi (Takao Ito), who beats her up whenever he gets drunk. Junko was the only person who believed in Kenzo when he was a struggling young writer, but when he abandoned his literary aspirations and went to work for a magazine (Housewife’s World), he caught the interest of the boss’s daughter, Michiko (Wakao), married her, and so abandoned Junko as well. Nevertheless, he still has feelings for Junko.

Michiko is a philanthropist who has set up a fund for disabled children, but she tends to irritate others, especially her rebellious sister, Rie (Kyoko Enami), who sees her as a meddling, self-righteous do-gooder. For her part, Junko clearly never got over Kenzo, and was only attracted to Kobayashi as he, too, is a struggling young writer. At her suggestion, Kobayashi submits a manuscript to Housewife’s World through Kenzo; although it’s rejected, he manages to get himself introduced to Rie and begins plotting to marry her for her money and abandon Junko, just as Kenzo had done (albeit out of weakness rather than cold calculation). However, Michiko sees through Kobayashi and takes matters into her own hands, but her actions unwittingly lead to blackmail, murder and a complicated web of lies which eventually expose corruption among those close to her and give the lie to the magazine’s tagline: ‘Clean! Bright! Beautiful!’

I found the male lead, Koji Takahashi, a little wooden, but he may well have been instructed to play the role in stoic fashion and keep it low key. He seems to have been a TV star who never really made it in the movies and in any case I suspect that Masumura wasn’t too concerned with having a strong male actor in the role – as the title suggests, this film is more about the women. Wakao’s co-star, Mariko Okada, is another fine actress of equal stature who had appeared in the films of Ozu, Naruse and Kinoshita; she later married the director Yoshishige Yoshida, for whom she made many films. Okada also played Oida to Tatsuya Nakadai’s Iemon in Illusion of Blood (1965) and later gave a fine comic performance opposite Nakadai in I Am a Cat (1975). Unfortunately, the nature of the plot means that Wakao and Okada have only two fairly brief and rather tame scenes together towards the end. Overall, despite her miscasting, Wakao makes it work and there’s never a false note in her performance. The same can be said of Okada, who seems more suitably cast as the unfailingly sweet-natured Junko.[2] Kyoko Enami, best-known as the star of the Woman Gambler film series, is also good value as Michiko’s bad-girl sister.  

The film benefits from Masumura’s typically no-nonsense direction and tight editing, clocking in at around 90 minutes as virtually all of his films do. The widescreen cinematography and muted colour scheme, while not exceptional, look good throughout, and there’s a classy string quartet score by Tadashi Yamauchi. In the latter stages, the plot becomes increasingly complex in quite a clever way, but Masumura keeps it plausible, wisely focusing on the characters rather than the plot twists. Being Masumura, he also introduces some discordant elements such as the dissolute aristocratic voyeur. However, although Arrow Video have released some excellent DVD editions of the director’s films recently, I suspect that the comparative lack of sex and violence along with other typical cult movie elements in Two Wives means that this particular film is unlikely to receive such a release. Furthermore, I personally did not feel that Two Wives could in any way be placed in the suspense genre as some have described it. The omission of the novel’s mystery element and the string quartet score – which lends an air of detached melancholy to the proceedings – are evidence that this was not the intention. Instead, it seems to me that Shindo and Masumura were more interested in making a thoughtful adult drama examining lives built on shaky foundations which are easily caused to crumble.

Intriguingly, Wakao and Okada played love rivals again the following year in Tadashi Imai's The Time of Reckoning (Fushin no toki), although their roles were reversed, with Okada playing the wife and Wakao the mistress. Alas, Imai's film – the only other one in which the two both appeared – seems currently impossible to see in the West. 

[1] Patrick Quentin is actually a nom de plume of the British writer Hugh Wheeler.

[2] As there is no indication that Junko was ever married to Kenzo, the title seems something of a misnomer.