Zero Focus (Zero no shôten) (1961)

 

Director Yoshitarô Nomura

author Seichō Matsumoto

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.

Death of a Cyclist (Muerte de un ciclista)

 

Director Juan Antonio Bardem

Lucia Bosė

DEATH OF A CYCLIST (Muerte de un ciclista)       A-                                                              aka:  Age of Infidelity                                                                                                             Spain  Italy  (88 mi)  1955  d: Juan Antonio Bardem

After 60 years, Spanish cinema is politically futile, socially false, intellectually worthless, aesthetically valueless, and industrially paralytic. Spanish cinema has turned its back on reality and is totally removed from Spanish realistic traditions as found in paintings and novels.     —Juan Antonio Bardem, in Salamanca, Spain, 1955

An interesting relic from the Franco era in Spain that is memorable on several counts, as the writer/director Juan Antonio Bardem is the uncle of modern day actor Javier Bardem (Vicky Cristina Barcelona, No Country for Old Men, Before Night Falls) and the film won the Fipresci prize at Cannes in 1955, a time when the director was actually serving time in prison for political offenses.  Public outcry led to his release, but he was arrested several more times in his lifetime.  The director was a Communist and ardent anti-Fascist who never left Spain during the Franco regime, so certainly this social realist film may be seen through his politicized eyes examining the complacency of the Spanish bourgeois society under Franco, where fear is a common denominator that keeps people silent and in lockstep, and might be seen as his version of Buñuel’s THE EXTERMINATING ANGEL (1962), filtered through the psychologically paranoid lens of Hitchcock, giving it the feel of a horror film.  It features beautiful Italian actress Lucia Bosé, the winner of Miss Italy 1947 (which included other contestants Gina Lollobrigida, Silvana Mangano, Eleonora Rossi Drago and Gianna Maria Canale) and star of Michelangelo Antonioni's THE STORY OF A LOVE AFFAIR (1950).  Her beauty alone is striking and is central to the film as she plays María, a pampered and spoiled socialite who is comfortably married to a rich industrialist Miguel (Otello Toso) whose wealth allows her to live a life of extravagance and luxury while she is secretly having an affair with an unambitious assistant college professor Juan (Alberto Closas), whose influential family arranged for his position.  Their wealth gives them the ability to hide their secrets. 

In the opening scene, on a flat country road that extends endlessly across an empty landscape, a lone figure on a bicycle is struck by a car driven by Juan and María who quickly decide to scurry away like rats rather than help the man, Muerte de un ciclista (J.A Bardem, 1955) [HD] | FlixOlé YouTube (1:52).  The rest of the movie revolves around this single event, where the two choose to conceal their affair rather than save a man’s life, a decision that haunts them when they learn the man died on the side of the road.  In one of the strangest possible changes in mood, they immediately find themselves at a swank, upscale party where the mysteriously strange piano player, Rafa (Carlos Casaravilla), claims he saw her with Juan on the road that day and seems to relish the idea of playing a song entitled “Blackmail,” where the interplay between the two of them is choreographed like a song.  The subsequent dread at the thought of being exposed and “losing everything,” which plainly means their privileged position in society, starts gnawing away at each of them, but in a different way.  Juan visits the working class village where the dead man lived, a striking contrast of Italian realist poverty to the protected palatial estates of the wealthy, and in this manner seems to reconnect to the world around him, perhaps seeing for the first time the role social divisions play in Franco’s society, while María is seeking protection from the man she sees as an extortionist, growing more hysterical at the thought of what she stands to lose, especially from a vile bottom feeder like Rafa, who is a repulsive, Iago-like figure that dwells in a cave-like world of rumors and “dirty little secrets.”  Also an art critic, he seems perfectly at home in the dreamlike atheistic dissonance of modern art, where he finds nothing remotely peculiar or understandable in the harsh abstractions or formless expressions, but his blood curdles at the idea of always being treated as an outsider, so using devious, underhanded means to expose the hypocrisy of the rich comes natural to him, as this represents a new breed of Franco citizenry that spies on and exposes the moral ills of society, keeping the public safe from itself. 

This all comes to a head in a superb nightclub scene of Flamenco singing, where Rafa, drunk from liquor, seems to be setting the trap whispering in people’s ears, while María grows more frantically suspicious by the second, becoming a feverish montage of close ups shown with a maniacal energy that suggests madness or delirium, 🚩 Recordando a JUAN ANTONIO BARDEM YouTube (5:58).  The film benefits greatly from unusual cuts and a modern sound design, not to mention faces accentuated by white light, turning Bosé’s face into a highly fragile porcelain figurine.  Bardem elevates the hysteria of fear to unseen heights, turning this into a Hitchcock homage to horror, as everything that follows slowly unravels from its hinges, as Bosé’s María turns into a woman-in-black femme fatale who senses only the darkest ulterior motives.  It’s an unusual bit of movie hysteria, all shown in a taut 88 minutes, where the finale was altered due to the concerns of the national censors, where we’ll perhaps never know the original intentions of the director.  Shot by Alfredo Fraile, the clarity of the image is superb, where it has been suggested Bardem may have had the only 35mm camera in all of Spain.  As it is, it’s a startling social critique using sharp jagged edges shining the light on some of the darkest days in recent Spanish history, using a scathing noirish melodrama to expose how the wealthy will cling to any corrupt or immoral means to hold onto their privileged status in life, where greed and selfishness are their birthright, and supporting Franco allowed their opulent lifestyles to continue unabated.