Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s intense masterpiece filled with deceptive surfaces, the paranoia of fascism, and a heartbreaking love story.
At the center of Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s new WW2 set spy-thriller-romance is the relationship of a Japanese merchant Yusaku Fukuhara (Issey Takahashi) and his wife Satoko (Yû Aoi) who have it great until Yusaku leaves for occupied Manchuria and comes back with terrifying evidence about atrocities carried out by Japanese government. Meanwhile, an old friend Yasuharu Tsumori (Masahiro Higashide), now part of the secret police kempetai, approaches Satoko and becomes a looming presence over the couple’s attempts to survive and search for the truth. An essential part of the story is also Yusaku’s nephew Fumio (Ryôta Bandô) who follows him in his amateur film projects and a trip to Manchuria but soon becomes one of the regime’s many victims, an example set to Yusaku whose attempts at safeguarding the terrible truth and escaping to the U.S. are overshadowed by the tight grip of surveilling police. The film is set to the height of Japanese nationalism and fascism, and it’s filled with mercurial identities, unspoken emotions, general paranoia, and anxiety that define human relationships.
Wife of a Spy is an unreal and devastating portrait of fascism, a film about contested and fleeting reality. Whereas the physical portrayal of the era is precise (Kurosawa even emphasizes the real moment by preferring long takes that were also an essential part of the era’s filmmakers’ repertoire e.g. Mizoguchi and Yamanaka) and every honed detail truthfully emphasizes the historical reality, the characters have a chance to shape and even forge it. Most concretely this is perceptible in kempetai’s power to effectively supervise, capture, and “persuade” individuals to act according to national interests, the reality defined by those in power. As a counterforce, Yusaku’s evidence from Manchuria offers a challenge to the official image of Japan and its “noble” intentions, giving him a potential chance to influence how the world stands. Similarly, Fumio decides to retreat to a far-away inn to write a novel before he is drafted, presumably writing down his version of the wartime reality. Part of the political game presented in the film is surviving or staying sane. The way for our main couple to achieve this objective is by safeguarding or searching for “the truth” whether it’s love, humanity, or cinema (Yusaku’s amateur film plays an important part in the film’s reality).
Kurosawa keeps playing with our expectations and whereas the film has its espionage-genre-loyal aspects like the constant surprises and twists, their causes can be traced to the character of the period that he tries to evoke. One of the main reasons for the audiences to feel manipulated is that one cannot fully understand the characters. Their emotional lives are deeply intertwined with the codes of political reality that seem alien to us so any ”nobility” that we feel like they owe us must be judged according to the period’s demands (yet one can’t forget the possibility of change). In this surveillance society, one has to contain their true emotion and observe and express their feelings according to what is best for their safety. Even if Yusaku returns from Manchuria with seemingly noble intentions, it is not enough for him to trust in his evidence and sense of justice but he must weave a complicated plan so that he’ll survive to tell the truth. Consequently, when his wife learns about the incident, her instinct for self-protection awakens and it’s not only Yusaku’s plan we come to worry about. In the end, their failure to communicate lies in the fact that one is more honest and loves another more than the other loves them. Here Wife of a Spy reveals its heartbreaking realization that becomes more than a cliche, thanks to the interesting dynamics between genre, politics, and emotion: love is not enough to “save the world”.
The film utilizes multiple genre elements and classical filmmaking techniques to explore the stratification of political systems, the way our reality is constructed, and the ways people navigate this labyrinthine reality at the cost of their emotions and identity. Wife of a Spy surprises the audiences by becoming an ontological expedition to the heart of fascism that doesn’t only exist as a political system but extends to personal life. Moreover, it effortlessly turns to meta-cinematic territory and explores cinema’s potential in generating reality. This is visible in both the techniques he prefers and the way he uses Yusaku’s amateur film and the evidential film from Manchuria together. The direction relies heavily on blocking and set detail, stays wary of close-ups, and avoids shot-reverse-shot editing. In contrast, he often uses hazy lighting to create an impression of people bathing in light, kind of only half-being there despite the long takes forcing the characters into their places in the historical present. These aesthetic choices are conspicuous today but they serve a crucial role in creating a vivid impression of the ambivalent historical past.
According to Olaf Möller, the film was originally shot with special 8K resolution cameras that made the detail look even more precise. Whereas only a few people have seen the original version, some traces of this high definition shooting mode still distort the image to an extent and make the audience feel the world is particularly tough. Wife of a Spy is a film of extraordinary finesse that is aware of its illusions and instead of experimenting for experiment’s sake, forces us to look at our present surroundings and rethink our relationship to cinema and the past. Kurosawa has crafted the first true masterpiece of the decade.
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