"The Spy's Wife" claimed to be the best of the year in Japan last year.
The "niche" Kurosawa Kiyoshi resolutely "went out of the circle" and used a very popular film to apologize for the atrocities of the Japanese militarist period, reflecting the persistence and ambition of Japanese left-wing directors.
For the purity of Kurosawa Kiyoshi, major European film festivals have given awards, the film was nominated for the Venice Golden Lion Award, and finally helped Kurosawa Kiyoshi win the Silver Lion Award for Best Director.
Not only in Europe, the authoritative Japanese film magazine "Shunbao" also supported "The Spy's Wife" and won the title of Japan's best film of the year.
"The Spy's Wife" thus became The most internationally renowned film by Kiyoshi Kurosawa after the Tokyo Sonata, The Shore Trip, and The Walking Invaders.
The film tells the story of a "spy" before the outbreak of Japanese militarism and the imminent outbreak of the Pacific War from the perspective of a Japanese woman. Kiyoshi Kurosawa revealed his historical scars and rarely exposed the horrific crimes of the Japanese Far East Army's "731 Unit Germ Warfare". This video evidence has also become the "MacGuffin" of the spy genre elements of the whole film.
The development of the story to the middle and late stages revolves around how this evidence is sent abroad, the truth and falsity of the evidence as a dramatic conflict and plot foreshadowing, even in the last second of the film, the whereabouts of the evidence, and the impact on the characters have not been able to get a given answer.
Kurosawa Kiyoshi strictly implemented the routine of classic suspense films, blurring the true and false, and retaining the suspense until the last second. However, there are still many hardcore fans who believe that "The Spy's Wife" is Kurosawa's "worst in history". At present, the score of the film remains at 7.6, which is a high score among Kurosawa Kiyoshi's films.
Its evaluation is polarized, mainly because Kurosawa kiyoshi abandons his own signature type and tells a simple story "safely and popularly" in a more mainstream, even flattering way.
Kurosawa Kiyoshi disenchanted himself, losing his sense of mystery and instability, much to the dismay of some die-hard fans.
<h1 class= "pgc-h-arrow-right" > the standard-bearer of Japanese psychological horror films</h1>
For Kurosawa Kiyoshi, many fans still remember his horror films, from "X Holy Cure", which characterizes social autism, "Circuit" metaphorically in the Internet age, as well as "Bright Future", "Attic", "Spirit" and so on.
Dilapidated houses and buildings, dark rooms, mottled walls, dirty plastic sheets, dust and puddles on the ground. In these irregular, opaque, and unclean spaces, there is an infinite visual potential, and in some passages of "X Sacred Rule", "Circuit", and "Shout", they are played to the extreme, leaving the audience with a fear shadow that is still difficult to forget.
The intense style of weirdness and horror in Kurosawa Kiyoshi's works comes almost entirely from exquisite camera scheduling, and does not rely on the American jump scare-like "visual flash" and "sound effect bombing".
The output of those eerie and horror elements is sometimes even presented in a "silenced" manner, injecting mystery and insecurity into the audience's brain nerves like venom, watching people's psychological defenses collapse directly.
In recent years, Kurosawa Kiyoshi has begun to transform, and he has integrated the original horror film approach into social and family issues, proving that the techniques that were effective in horror films can also be perfectly transplanted into other types of films.
So we see more complex "experimental" films such as "Journey to the Shore" and "Walking Invaders".
These films retain Kurosawa Kiyoshi's complex and inexplicable sense of mysterious transcendence, and in the story, they are "strange", terrorizing and mystifying ordinary life and experience, forming a unique Kurosawa Kiyoshi aesthetic style.
In this "Wife of a Spy", Kurosawa Seems to be actively diluting this "aesthetic style", under the scheduling of the set and stage drama forms of high-age drama scenes, the visual insecurity and mystery are gradually lost, everything is open and transparent, full of deliberate display and nudity, and the scene becomes monotonous, false, and concise to the point of shock.
Because this is really not "Kurosawa Kiyoshi". Even at the end of the film, when the heroine walks from a mental hospital into the "hell" of the city destroyed by the war, the style of Kurosawa Kiyoshi, which is deliberately obscured, narrow in perspective, and highlights the mystery, is not thorough enough.
The ending of the film is placed on the open, eye-catching beach by the sea, the heroine wantonly vents her inner bitterness and pain, this kind of implicit way of expression, which is obviously different from Kurosawa Kiyoshi's previous style.
This is also the place that is most criticized by Kurosawa Kiyoyo fans.
<h1 class= "pgc-h-arrow-right" > self-deconstruction and active withdrawal</h1>
"The Spy's Wife" can be compared with Ang Lee's "Lust, Caution" in terms of story. The stories all focus on women, telling their self-growth in history, and all are related to "love".
"Lust, Caution" focuses on lust and loyalty, while "The Spy's Wife" emphasizes love and justice, both are the contradiction dialectics of the righteousness of the family and the country and the selfishness of the widow, history as the main body of the great, overriding everything, silently behind the force, secretly controlling everything.
Satoko Fukuhara (Yu Aoi) was originally a carefree Hirota, married to a businessman in the foreign trade business, Yusaku Fukuhara (Yusei Takahashi), who is at ease as a little woman behind a man. Usually take care of family affairs, from time to time act as an "audition" actress in front of the husband's camera, and occasionally send New Year gifts to employees.
She only needs to love her husband well, and home is her strongest fortress, resisting the turmoil and turmoil of the outside world. At that time, Japanese military-industrialism was prevalent, the Axis of Evil Alliance was established, and the Pacific War was on the verge of breaking out. Japan seems to be strong, but in fact it is moving towards the center of the "embattled" dilemma. On a fortuitous trip, the camera captures the Far Eastern Army's atrocities in Manchuria, the "731" biochemical study that shocked the world.
This terrifying history appears in the form of silent films in the film, and people are cold and sweaty in just a few tens of meters. The abused civilians, the germ warfare researcher sneering at the camera, are among the most horrific scenes of the year. Silent film is the core narrative and suspense part of "The Spy's Wife" McGuffin.
At the beginning of the film, a spy silent film film shot by Yusaku and starring Satoko was originally a daily pastime as an entertainment employee, but in the end it became the narrative Offim McGuffin of "stealing the dragon and turning the phoenix" and "the golden cicada out of the shell", and it was also Satoko's cruel epiphany about love and righteousness, truth and hypocrisy.
Whether it is a play within a play or a strong stage play style, it is actually an attempt by He Zeqing to maintain active withdrawal and deconstruct his own style. The core of suspense films lies in "true and false when false is also true", and it is difficult to distinguish between true and false is the highest realm and narrative technique of suspense films.
The director uses the form of the stage play and the constant appearance of silent film-within-a-play to extract the audience from the dramatic situation in order to better examine the subtle connections between the home country. The main line of the story is how to send evidence of atrocities abroad, and in order to achieve this, many sacrifices are made between the characters.
In the beginning, a mysterious woman brought back from Manchuria died "accidentally". This leads to the gendarmerie starting to investigate, and Takuji Tsumori (Masao Higashiide), who is in love with Satoko's childhood playmate, almost misunderstands Yuji's derailment and develops pity and sympathy for Satoko.
This is where lust begins to swell. Taiji's desperate investigation is originally intended to protect Satoko and prove his love.
Satoko, on the other hand, initially suspects Yusaku's infidelity, and becomes jealous and appears irrational. But after Satoko saw the video evidence, her change of mind was not entirely out of national righteousness, but still stayed on the small love.
She is willing to sacrifice her subjectivity, become the wife of a spy, willing to become a vassal of her husband, help him realize the ideal in his heart, and complete the task of justice.
To this end, she sacrificed Yusaku's relatives, which indirectly led to Yusaku's final choice to temporarily sacrifice his wife, Satoko, for his love-obsessed wife. Many sacrifices illustrate the choice between the righteousness of the family and the desires of the individual.
Satoko was betrayed twice, one was that her husband chose to sacrifice her, and the other was that Taiji rudely severed her relationship, slapped her in front of everyone, and scolded her as a traitor.
The theme of the film is presented, that is, through structure and withdrawal, the tragic life of the imperial wife is shown. While facing up to the historical brutality of the military state and the victimization of women, it also exposes the victor's theory of justice and the feminization of the victims in the construction of historical discourse.
The first half of the film uses the first half to create a seemingly dynamic female character; and in the second half, it shows why "she" is still the "actor" of history, a "spy's wife" without a name, rather than a director who controls everything. And the husband Yusaku is the controller who always controls the camera and fiddles with the chess game.
Satoko, who is "loving", is doomed to lose to her husband, who symbolizes "justice", and falls prey to the historical limitations of "home-country isomorphism". The few explanations about the future of the characters at the end of the film show Kurosawa Kiyoshi's deconstruction and withdrawal.
Previously, the doctor who came to see Satoko said that "the current information is unreliable" and it is not known whether Yusaku died or not. At the end of the film, the text is ambiguous about whether Yusaku died or not, and it is not known why Satoko went to the United States.
Whether the husband and wife can break the mirror and reunite, it is up to the audience's imagination. War is full of lies of performance, the truth of the film and the authenticity of identity, all of which are irrelevant. Even life and death can be made up, and everyone can only live in a chess game of betrayal and destruction that may be defeated at any time.
When the horrors of the ghostly truth invaded from the human experiments of the curtain and the incendiary bombs of the great air raids, the archipelago was shrouded in hellfire, and the disguised masks of marriage and country, love and ideals were burned away, revealing historical facts and humanity in the endless nights and ruins.