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| Director Yoshitarô Nomura |
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| author Seichō Matsumoto |
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| screenwriter Shinobu Hashimoto |
ZERO FOCUS (Zero no shôten) B+ Japan (95 mi) 1961 ‘Scope d: Yoshitarô Nomura
sagging clouds
alone facing
the raging waves
I feel sadness
first trip to Noto
—Seichō Matsumoto poem carved into a stone near the Yase Cliff (Yase no Dangai) on the Noto Peninsula, Matsumoto Seicho's "Zero Focus" and Noto
Not your ordinary Japanese film, a mix of a slow-burning character study and a tense psychological thriller, this is arguably the most overtly film noir style of all of Nomura’s films, one of eight films the director made adapting the works of Seichō Matsumoto, an Akutagawa Prize-winning author in 1952 and the consummate crime fiction writer in Japan with more than 450 crime stories, where his works tend to focus on the minute details of crimes and the impact they had on society. Perhaps because Japanese government censors banned detective novels during the war, declaring them unpatriotic, Matsumoto got a late start writing in his early forties, becoming Japan’s highest paid writer, politically left-leaning and popular with Japanese audiences, but his downbeat novels were emblematic of the postwar pessimism in the turbulent years following atomic annihilation, foreign occupation, and waning nationalism. Taut and tightly constructed, the screen adaptation is co-written by Yōji Yamada, a director in his own right, maker of THE TWILIGHT SAMURAI (2002), and Shinobu Hashimoto, a frequent collaborator with Akira Kurosawa, including RASHOMON (1950), IKIRU (1952), and SEVEN SAMURAI (1954), writing more than 80 screenplays, where this has a distinct literary style with existential voiceovers and duplicitous characters, mixing an underlying Hitchcockian sense of dread with postwar Japanese social commentary, evolving into a multi-layered, convoluted plot taking us down a rabbit hole of intrigue and shocking revelations, each one drawing us into this labyrinthian flashback structure that grows ever more unhinged. Notable for its use of three women as the lead protagonists, very much ahead of its time in that regard, especially for crime thrillers, probably the most women-centered noir you’ll ever see, described as feminist noir, as it simply was not done at the time, especially in the paternalistic Japanese society. The son of a silent film director Hōtei Nomura, the still mostly unheralded Nomura may be one of Japanese cinema’s best kept secrets, working as an assistant director for Kurosawa on The Idiot (Hakuchi) (1951) and spending his entire career for the Shochiku film studio. Japanese noir has a very distinct sensibility, with shifting values of modernism, including the postwar American occupation, skeptical views of progress as well as ambivalent views of the past, existential angst and paranoia, a fatalistic sense of doom, with a reevaluation of social and gender roles for those struggling on the margins. In this film, prostitution is an underlying theme, but barely touched upon, focusing instead on the psychological ramifications, where there is an effort to transform one’s life from the cruel realities of the past, but reintegration into mainstream society proves more difficult than it seems. Mizoguchi’s OSAKA ELEGY (1936) was one of the first critiques of gender issues, examining the darker side of sex workers (the director’s older sister was sold into prostitution when he was a child), realistically exploring a young woman’s victimization and descent into prostitution, while Kurosawa’s STRAY DOG (1949) takes noir in a new direction with a police procedural in the ruins of postwar Tokyo, utilizing a near documentary style where the camera moves fluidly through crowded streets, following a detective through Tokyo’s poverty-ridden streets for one entire reel without any dialogue, capturing the physicality of the people, the style, the mood, especially the heat, contrasted against Western influences, the introduction of a gun, baseball, white suits, dancing girls, the blues, jazz, and classical music, with Kurosawa training his eye on Japanese postwar corruption. This film explores the trauma Japanese women had to endure following the country’s defeat in WWII mixed with revelations of corruption and prostitution during the American occupation, where rampant poverty and limited options forced some into prostitution, having to work very hard to escape that shameful past, which could prove tragic if it becomes known, where a panicked fear eventually leads to murder and suicide. This gritty black and white noir is the first of two film versions, as a color adaptation was released nearly 50 years later by Isshin Inudo in 2009.
The question of how much we really know about our married partner is a popular device in thriller fiction, bringing comparisons to Hitchcock and his films such as Rebecca (1940) and Suspicion (1941), but this film also draws heavily from Vertigo (1958), accentuating a psychological hysteria that is further exaggerated by the swirling music of Bernard Hermann, while here it is a similarly provocative musical score by Yasushi Akutagawa, known primarily for his films with Kon Ichikawa. Merging Japanese social realities with the pictorial and symbolic qualities of Japanese landscapes, it’s hard to think of another film that utilizes a steep cliff overlooking a swirling ocean below as well as this one does, described by local police as a beautiful natural vista, but also a popular spot for suicides. At the center of the story is Teiko, Yoshiko Kuga, who worked with Kurosawa, Mizoguchi, Naruse, Ōshima, and Ozu, a Tokyo woman who is seen at the outset getting happily married to a man ten years older than her, a very successful advertising executive, Kenichi (Kōji Nanbara), supposedly the man of her dreams, though they met through a centuries-old family tradition of Miai, which is more of a suggested rather than arranged marriage, with representatives from his company singing his praises at the wedding, where they appear to have a very happy life ahead of them. As he’s been promoted to the head office in Tokyo, he takes a short business trip to the offices in coastal Kanazawa to finalize his business dealings there and arrange for his new successor, Zero Focus (1961), directed by Yoshitaro Nomura. #film ... TikTok (2:41), but as the days pass, to her dismay he never returns. Neither the company nor the police have any idea what has happened to him, but lacking any sense of urgency, she decides to search for him on her own, at first with the help of his employer, but eventually on her own, bringing with her a pair of old photographs she found among his things, but little else to go on, uncovering a series of unexplained deaths and sham suicides as well as a mountain of details that suggest he was living a double life, circumstances not even his co-workers knew about. Assuming the role of private detective, the more she learns, the less she knows about him, as she searches for clues among a web of lies and deceit that shroud a secret life he was leading, traveling to the western provinces, where it quickly changes to deep snow, which falls relentlessly, but you never know what’s buried underneath, turning even more somber when Kenichi’s brother Sotaro (Kō Nishimura) also intervenes and investigates on his own, but things quickly go awry. Yet what stands out are the uniqueness of the locations, including a gorgeous seaside route along the railway, with stops at the Hakui Station and the Sanmiyo Station (discontinued in 1972), with breathtaking footage of the coast up to the Noto Peninsula on the rugged north Japan sea coast, which was also featured in Shōhei Imamura’s final film WARM WATER UNDER A RED BRIDGE (2001) and also Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Maborosi (Maboroshi no hikari) (1995), a film that also deals with a missing husband and has many visual parallels. In what is essentially a whodunit, she is dumbfounded to discover the exact same locations as the photographs, one of which is Kanazawa Castle in the snow, while the other is a small wooden house along a barren, windswept coast in a desolate, economically backward region, with dilapidated houses still built largely out of wood and in many respects unchanged since ancient times, with a high wall of fortified sticks built to keep out both the water and the wind, where the community is sketched out with an almost documentary detail, discovering hidden meanings layered underneath, yet perhaps the most unique aspect is the continued use of voiceovers to express her changing state of mind, filled with unanswered questions, where the mystery only deepens.
This film is like a puzzle box with hidden storage spaces that require intensive brainpower to unlock, as the deeper we get into this moody, atmospheric journey the more difficult it becomes to comprehend, where the real beauty is the secluded location of the windswept Noto Cliff, which frames the dizzying climax, surrounded by an omnipresent dark and dreary, yet tempestuous sea gushing below that recalls Grigori Kozintsev's HAMLET (1964), shot mostly on location in beautifully composed ‘Scope by Takashi Kawamata, where the bleak final act is given a grandiose and surreal stage for such high-wire emotional histrionics, delving into the ever-deepening mystery surrounding Kenichi’s secret life and disappearance. Adding to this unique theatricality is the dizzyingly exaggerated, Lady Macbethian performance of Sachiko (Hizuru Takachiho), the wife of a wealthy industrial magnate, Mr. Murota (Yoshi Katō), a friend of Kenichi, yet what’s intimated is a much earlier relationship, as in 1950 the missing husband used to be a street cop in Tachikawa near the American occupied airbase when Sachiko was working as a prostitute catering to American soldiers, something she has kept concealed all this time, yet it’s a past that she cannot escape, which is a classic noir theme. The things that people will do to keep their secrets from being exposed is uncanny, and Sachiko is involved in multiple levels of dirty dealings that the police have erroneously determined were either accidental deaths or suicides. The degree to which the police are clueless is a bit mindboggling, but the only one savvy enough to actually uncover the interconnectedness and underlying motives behind all these disappearances is Teiko, whose relentless investigation puts her life in danger, as everyone else who came remotely close to unraveling these mysteries ended up dead, so the fact she’s standing precariously close to the edge of a cliff feels more than a little ominous. Of course the music only amps up the tension, unleashing waves of explosive revelations that grow stranger by the minute. While we were led to believe that it was Kenichi who was the enigma, Sachiko is a powderkeg of hidden secrets that take this in an entirely different direction, becoming a feminist examination of the postwar predicament for women, many forced into unwanted sexual relationships, as though they were mere objects, denied any feeling of humanity. This is the essence of the Japanese noir modern woman, an unsettling figure outside the conventions and traditions of marriage and family, existing on the margins of society, expressing individuality and independence by means of a self-imposed isolation, often resorting to and relying upon their exposure to criminality to find their way out of what they perceive as life-threatening situations. Few films convey a dire sense of desperation like this one, as if a noose has already been placed around Sachiko’s neck, suffocating not only from the choices she’s made but the consequences that come from their exposure, shown in a flurry of flashback sequences that unravel with differing RASHOMON-like interpretations. Teiko is the lead protagonist, but Sachiko is a mystery woman/femme fatale who becomes an avenging angel of death, while yet another woman from the past surfaces, Hisako (Ineko Arima), a reception girl of the agency’s Kanazawa branch, who turns out to be Kenichi’s common-law wife, and is equally mystified by his strange disappearance, yet she and Sachiko have similar pasts, where the three women are drawn together into the precarious final moments that only grow more melodramatically delirious. It’s a dense and often confounding film that requires plenty of subtitling, as it’s a whirlwind of rapidly changing events, each with their own deeply unsettling conundrums that have been buried under the surface, finally coming to light.
