The Hidden Profile / 風の視線 / Kaze no shisen (‘Gaze of the Wind’, 1963)

Obscure Japanese Film #181

Shima Iwashita

 

Keisuke Sonoi

 

Natsui (Keisuke Sonoi) is a photographer who has just entered into an arranged marriage with Chikako (Shima Iwashita). Their honeymoon is an awkward flop, but during the trip Natsui discovers the body of a suicide victim, grabs his camera and snaps away with ghoulish gusto.  He later uses the photos in an exhibition which is a big hit. 

 

Michiyo Aratama

 

Akira Yamanouchi

Keiji Sada

Natsui is actually in love with Ayako (Michiyo Aratama), but not only is she married to the mostly-absent Shigetaka (Akira Yamanouchi), but she’s in love with Kuze (Keiji Sada), with whom she’s having an affair, and who is also married and having an affair with a clingy bar hostess. It gradually emerges that Ayako was the one who arranged the marriage between Natsui and Chikako, partly to get Natsui to stop pestering her, but also because she knew that Chikako was having an affair with Shigetaka …

 

 

Perhaps it was somebody’s sly joke that this adaptation of a 1961 novel by Japan’s best-selling mystery writer Seicho Matsumoto begins with the discovery of a body but turns out to be a romantic drama rather than a crime story. A Shochiku production directed by Yoshiro Kawazu, who made the previously-reviewed Eyes of a Child (1955), it also features a rather stiff cameo by Seicho Matsumoto himself as a writer Kuze runs into in a bar. 

 

Seicho Matsumoto and Keiji Sada

 

The plot features a couple of unlikely and fairly pointless coincidences and in this case the level of suspense is mild to say the least. Despite a promising cast, nobody gets a chance to do their best work here, while composer Chuji Kinoshita simply seizes the opportunity to follow in the footsteps of Toshiro Mayuzumi and Sei Ikeno and experiment with a musical saw for no good reason. A story concerning such a bizarre web of intertwined relationships might have worked as a farcical black comedy, but the film takes itself far too seriously and plods leadenly on to its contrived conclusion, making it hard to regard it as anything other than a competent failure. 

 

 

Thanks to A.K.

DVD at Amazon Japan (no English subtitles) 

English subtitles courtesy of Coralsundy can be found here.