The Japanese women’s picture in the fifties had been no stranger to thwarted romantic love, but as a general rule, the women who suffered for love suppressed the visible expression of that love (see Floating Clouds for the example par excellence). With A Wife Confesses, we find ourselves in entirely new territory, where love is joined to passion. It is the world of Douglas Sirk and of Lana Turner and Susan Hayward, where women not only will suffer for love but will cry and scream and fight for that love. Within the josei-eiga, it is almost as explosive as was Yojimbo in the chanbara.
The movie itself explodes onto the screen, with a news cameraman starting to film us before turning to a crowd of reporters and photographers charging and yelling at a woman trying to make her way from a car into the courthouse, before the titles begin. The scene before the titles is now so common throughout the world that it is hard to imagine a time when this was new, but most Japanese movies before this date began with the titles. This may not be the first to break that mold, but it is certainly one of the most effective, and it tells us from the very first shot that we are in for something new.
The woman is Ayako Wakao, playing a character also named Ayako, who has been charged with the murder of her husband. The facts are clear. In a mountain climbing accident, she found herself dangling off the side of a cliff with her husband hanging below her.*
She cut the rope and her husband plunged to his death. The question before the court is, Why did she do it? Circumstantial evidence suggests murder. The husband left a large and recent insurance policy, he was a drunkard who cared little for her, and he had told other people that she was having an affair with Koda, a handsome young man who, it turns out, was the third man on the mountain.
Flashbacks, however, tell us that she was not having an affair and that their relationship was chaste. But they also tell us that she was nevertheless madly in love with Koda, even if he did not understand it at the time. But his fiancée Rie did understand it the moment she saw Ayako in court.
Up to this point, we are still in traditional territory — the unworthy husband, the attempt to be a good wife nonetheless (she even goes back to wearing kimono), the love that can not be consummated or even spoken. But during the trial, the dam starts to crack, and after the verdict it completely collapses. The passion released (which is still emotional, not sexual) eventually leads her to reveal her true motive for cutting the rope. I don’t want to go into more detail because this is one of the few movies I’ve posted about thus far where its power can be spoiled by too much information before you see it.
Ayako can no longer control herself, so out pours a veritable torrent of emotion that feels at times as if she is releasing the emotion of an entire generation of film women all at once. Where before this Hideko Takamine, for example, had let her soul and emotion out only through her eyes or where Kinuyo Tanaka had let the emotion well up but then pulled it back inside at the very last moment, Wakao here seems to turn herself inside out. In the last part of the picture, she often seems to have no skin, her emotions exposed like raw nerves. She simply wants desperately for someone to want her. It is the kind of no-holds-barred role that regularly wins awards in America if done well, but not what usually won in Japan. It is testimony to Wakao’s commitment and skill that this time it also won in Japan, both the Kinema Junpo and the Blue Ribbon Best Actress of 1961. It is also a testament to her skill that even the demure, kimono-clad court scenes never seem to be a fake personality put on just for the court.
There is of course the courtroom suspense of Guilty or Not Guilty, but as the movie unfolds, it reveals itself to be about so much more. Presumably much of this came from the popular novel on which it was based, but unlike the fevered soap operas of American fifties women’s pictures, the adaptation by Masato Ide maintains rather than simplifies any complexities the novel (which I have not read) may have had. Ayako was a child of the war, orphaned and left to make her own way during the Occupation years. When she meets her husband Takigawa, he is a teacher at the pharmacy school for whom she works part-time as an aide, but even so she is actually starving to death even while in school. There is hardly a romance, for Takigawa suggests they get married in the midst of his rape of Ayako. It is an odd suggestion by a rapist, no doubt, but starvation is her other option and the rape is going to happen no matter what, so she marries him afterwards.
Played by Eitaro Ozawa, another of those Japanese actors who seemed to be in everything, Takigawa is not an easy man to live with, for he really has only three passions, sex with Ayako, booze, and mountain climbing. To please him, she tries to learn to climb, she stays home and wears kimono, and she eventually gets pregnant, but he orders her to get an abortion. Yet he will not give her a divorce. Since she is an orphan, she has no family to return to. This gives us a bit more detail about the divorce laws instituted during the Occupation, as Takigawa explains to her that she has no grounds for a divorce: he has not been unfaithful, he is not ill, and he is not insane, so no court will give her a divorce without his consent and he “likes things just as they are.”
Into this dismal situation wanders Kudo (Hiroshi Kawaguchi), a representative of the drug company for whom Takigawa acts as a consultant and drug tester to augment his teaching salary. Kudo is actually a nice man; though his fellow workers tease him about getting engaged to Rie, the daughter of the company’s largest client, he never gives any hint of any ulterior motive in that arrangement. But he does come by the house to drop off material for Takigawa, later to bring drugs for Ayako’s migraines, and even goes so far as to put up a shelf for her (something I’ve never seen in any previous Japanese movie and, apparently, something Ayako herself regards as little short of amazing). The maid misinterprets these meetings and passes the info along to Takigawa, which is why he begins to think they are are having an affair. Takigawa also starts dragging Koda along on the mountain climbing expeditions.
We also get a rare view inside a Japanese courtroom, where there are three judges in this serious case but no jury. If we are to believe the movie, witnesses can be recalled at any time to clarify previous statements, the defendant can be questioned by the prosecutor during any other witness’s testimony, and the defendant, though represented by her own defense lawyer, has no consultation or contact with him during the court scenes, which means he often finds himself trying to defend her against her own statements.** There is also something of a shock when the prosecutor demands she be convicted of the premeditated murder of her husband and given a sentence of two whole years (!!!).
Though the emotional intensity seems to suggest Douglas Sirk, the look of the film is as far from Sirk as possible. The wide-screen black and white as directed by Masumura is constantly changing its attention as the detail of the plot constantly changes and no shot seems to be a repeat of another previous set-up. The courtroom scenes generally avoid the center-weighted compositions of witness-attorney back and forth, and the home scenes jump from intense close-ups to middle-distance shots suggesting overheard or secret feelings. As Ayako becomes more deranged, the compositions shift more off-center.
Masumura had been working with Wakao since she was a teenager in Blue Sky Maiden, though before this film we could hardly call them a team like Mizoguchi and Tanaka, Naruse and Takamine, or Ozu and Hara. Though each would make many movies without each other in the next few years, A Wife Confesses would initiate a string of powerful romantic melodramas made together that would put them ion the same league as those other directors and actors and which can challenge any made anywhere else in the world at any time. It is a remarkable movie for its time and place and still an engrossing and fascinating film today.
* Most of the largest island of Japan is mountainous, and the central range, though rarely rising above 10,000 feet was still largely unexplored when western visitors christened it the Japanese Alps. Much of the terrain is quite rugged with steep rock faces that require considerable skill to climb, and in the twentieth century mountain climbing became a popular hobby for a small but significant part of the middle class.
** The lack of a jury and the inability to exclude evidence, including the defendant’s own inadvertent admissions, are some of the reasons the American military often give when they refuse to let Americans be tried in Japanese courts, which leads to much local discontent, especially in Okinawa. But it is not all that unusual in the rest of the world; almost no French trials have a jury and in Britain they only are used in the most serious cases. Only in America does the defendant sit at a table with his or her attorney during the trial.
