Women take lead in rare ’60s Japanese noir films
After a nearly threemonth hiatus, the Roxie Theater’s Midcentury Madness international noir series returns this weekend with a doublebarreled blast of rarely screened feminist fury from 1961 Japan.
First up on Saturday, June 18, is “Ten Dark Women,” master director Kon Ichikawa’s satirical noir about a high-powered TV executive who becomes the subject of a murder plot by his wife — and nine mistresses. It’s followed by Yoshitarô Nomura’s “Zero Focus,” a rare noir from that era in that it places a woman — a newlywed bride, trying to solve the disappearance of her husband — front and center.
This is rare stuff. “Ten Dark Women” was last screened in the Bay Area in 2006, while programmer Don Malcolm said “Zero Focus” is making its U.S. theatrical premiere.
In “Ten Dark Women,” screenwriter Natto Wada, Ichikawa’s wife and frequent collaborator, takes issue with the patriarchal structure of Japan’s entertainment industry. Kaze (Eiji Funakoshi) is a network honcho who takes the casting couch to outrageous extremes. While his wife (Fujiko Yamamoto, Daiei Studio’s biggest female star at the time) runs a restaurant, the nine mistresses he juggles are from all levels of the network, from actresses and models to women behind the scenes in the editing, printing and other departments.
The only thing they have in common: Kaze controls their careers. And he’s so self-absorbed, he has nothing substantial to offer them emotionally.
Wada mixes a little sugar with her arsenic in her wickedly humorous script.
“He has no shadow, like Peter Pan,” observes one of the mistresses, a rising actress (the great Keiko Kishi) who is frustrated by the way he leverages his power. “In a way, he’s the perfect modern man: If it weren’t for the trappings of the modern age, he’d disappear into thin air.”
Weary of his philandering, his wife gathers her nine rivals and floats the idea of killing him. The mistresses — who include Kyôko Kishida, soon to be immortalized in film history as the title character in Hiroshi Teshigahara’s international hit “Woman in the Dunes” — are immediately receptive.
They essentially flip the script: As the film progresses, the ultimate alpha male is emasculated, becoming “feminized” at the hands of his empowered women.
“Zero Focus,” on the other hand, is a more serious film, mostly taking place in the snowy winter of a changing postwar Japan.
Based on a novel by Seicho Matsumoto, who is credited with popularizing detective fiction in Japan, the film stars Yoshiko Kuga as Teiko, a 30something Tokyo woman who marries Kenichi (Kôji Nanbara), a man she barely knows. She is desperate for marriage; he is a rising executive at a national firm who has been promoted from the satellite office in a remote seaside town to the main office in Tokyo.
Long marginalized and perhaps a bit insecure, Teiko is initially swept off her feet.
“His overwhelming passion suffocated me,” she says in her hypnotic narration. “It’s as if he was comparing me to someone else.”
After a few days of marital bliss, Kenichi travels back to his small town to close out his apartment, clean out his office and say his goodbyes to clients and colleagues. He is to be gone 12 days; when he doesn’t come back, Teiko is determined to track him down. A natural detective, the dogged and indefatigable Teiko spends countless hours on trains, in offices and unfamiliar streets peeling back the onion on her husband’s mysterious life.
“Zero Focus” is kinetically edited and fastmoving, and Kuga carries the film with intensity and commitment.
Both of these 1961 gems ultimately are about the impossibility of escaping one’s past, and that’s as noir as it gets.