Wife of a Spy

 Wife of a Spy (2020) is strangely listless Japanese film, caught between melodrama and thriller and not persuasive with regard to either genre.  The picture has been compared with Hitchcock, primarily I think because the plot involves a woman married to a ruthless spy, the situation in his 1941 film Suspicion.  The comparison is invidious to the Japanese film.  Hitchcock's films of this sort (Notorious has a similar structure) rely upon real magnetism between the stars -- these pictures carry an erotic charge.  Oddly, Wife of a Spy features a married couple who purport to love one another but who seem desperately mismatched and lacking any on-screen chemistry at all.  This is curious because the director Kinoshita Kurosawa apprenticed making soft-core porno films and, therefore, should be well-qualified to insert erotic energy into this film.  But something goes wrong and the picture is very cold and abstract.  This is by design -- there's no question that Kurosawa is a gifted filmmaker; therefore, it seems that he has intentionally opted for an abstract, schematic, and stylized approach to this material.  The film's characteristics that I deem problematic are, in fact, purposeful alienation effects -- I just don't know why they are used in this picture.

Yusaku is a businessman in Kobe, plying the import-export trade in silk.  He has a large firm, seems to be wealthy, and has a trophy wife, the submisive Satoko.  As we gradually discover, Yusaku is using his business travel as an opportunity to conduct espionage.  He opposes the militarism of Japan in 1940 and, in fact, is scheming to procure evidence that will encourage the United States to intervene in wars then pending in Manchuria and southeast Asia.  For some reason, Yusaku is an amateur film-maker and he is  producing a picture starring his wife -- in the film within the film (one of two in the picture), she appears in a domino mask stealthily unlocking a safe and, then, as she tries to escape is gunned down by her husband who also stars in the movie.  (The film is highly self-reflexive, a movie about making and viewing movies -- this characteristic is evident in a scene in which someone discusses Mizoguchi and, then, Nikkatsu studios; Wife of a Spy is produced by Nikkatsu.)  When Satoko discovers that her husband is a spy and, therefore, traitor to the war effort, she is initially appalled.  But when she learns the stakes involved (the Japs are making bubonic plague in Manchuria and plan to unleash this baccillus as a weapon), she converts to  her husband's apparent idealism and, in fact, voluntarily becomes a martyr to the cause.  The MacGuffin in the film is a notebook full of medical diagrams and equations that documents the Japanese experiments with plague on prisoners of war in Manchuria.  There is also a film on a reel marked Pathe 9/5 that shows experiments with bubonic plague on POWs.  Yusaku is under suspicion by a childhood friend, Taiji, who has become a "squad leader" of Gestapo-like secret police.  In one scene, it is suggested that Satoko, who is miffed at her husband's frequent "business" travel (he's actually spying), likes Taiji and, perhaps, even attempts to seduce him.  But nothing comes of the encounter.  Fumio, an employee of the silk import firm, is also a spy.  He announces that he is quitting the firm to write a novel and takes up residence at  an Inn on the seashore.  In fact, he's translating into English the evidence of the biological warfare that the Japanese are developing.  A woman that he has brought back from Manchuria (she is apparently a witness to the war crimes in Manchuria) turns up dead, floating in the sea.  There's suspicion that Fumio murdered her.  But, more likely, she was killed by the Secret Police.  In any event, Fumio is apprehended by secret police under the supervision of Taiji who has the man tortured -- they tear out his finger- and toe-nails.  Yusaku recognizes that he must escape Japan and get to the United States.  By this time, Satoku is his enthusiastic partner in espionage -- she has discovered Yusaku's evidence of Manchurian war crimes, locked in her husband's safe at the import-export office.  (The scene in which she breaks into the safe recapitulates the home move involving her doing the same thing.)  Yusaku says he will meet her in San Francisco, telling her to stowaway on a ship headed for America.  He will travel separately -- and we see his ship, a little skiff, vanishing into the fog.  Satoko is locked in a crate in the hold of the ship.  But the Secret Police are on her trail and she is arrested with the canister of film showing the war crimes.  At the oddly ornate secret police headquarters, Taiji, who had a crush on her, now coldly punches her in the face.  The film is screened and, of course, it's the home movie and not the images of the war crimes.  There's a brief, highly stylized coda:  it's 1945 and Satoko has been locked away in a psych ward in Kobe.  She is considered particularly crazy because she hopes that the Japanese will lose the war, something incomprehensible to her fellow lunatics.  "They think I'm crazy because I'm the only sane one in this country," Satoko says, or words to that effect.  During a bombing raid, the asylum is destroyed and Satoku wanders out into a landscape of flames and some fallen brick arches -- this is supposed to represent the damage inflicted on the city during the air raid.  Satoko has been told that Yusaku was killed when the ship on which he was sailing  was sunk by a Japanese torpedo.  But a title tells us that the death certificate seems to have been forged and that Satoko traveled to San Francisco in 1946; it's implied that she meets Yusaku there.

Satoku's spying and, later, subversion seems masochistic.  (This is in accord with Kurosawa's resume which involves productions of so-called Pink or SM films.)  She's devoted to the callous and manipulative Yusaku like a dog is devoted to its master.  The home-made movie showing Satoku breaking into the safe is scored with a crooning love song that includes the words "This painful love is a one-way street."  The picture is mostly monochromatic, filmed in subtle shades of beige and khaki green.  MUBI is so negligent in the way that it presents its movies that I can't tell if the picture is shot out-of-focus or the transfer used by MUBI is poor and badly executed.  (Reviews indicate that the picture is very low budget and shot on some kind of digital camcorder with, possibly, poor focus and picture quality -- but not all of the move seems to be out-of-focus and so I suspect that this effect is an artifact of the haphazard way that MUBI streams its films -- the picture also buffered and had the weird effect of retaining the last subtitle on the screen, sometimes for a minutes at a time, before a new title appeared upon new dialogue occurring -- in some scenes, there was dialogue but no subtitles at all.  There really is no excuse for the way these movies are mutilated in their showing.)  The movie is unpleasant and not suspenseful.  It's interesting thematically -- the manipulative spy, Yusaku, is willing to mistreat his adoring wife  in order to accomplish his espionage objectives.  Clearly, he is no better than his adversaries in determining that the end justifies the means.  There's a scene in which the married couple go for a ride in the woods.  The movie uses horrible rear-projection as a homage, I think, to Hitchcock who's films are full of completely unpersuasive, if dream-like, rear projection sequences.  The movie is replete with imagery suggesting films and film-making -- when a co-conspirator knocks holes in the crate where Satoku is hiding the light streams through the penetrations like the ray of a movie projector shining in the darkness.