In its plot, Ryoju is something out of the Douglas Sirk/Lana Turner mold from the fifties — a passionate love affair full of secrets that destroys marriages, ruins lives, and even leads to suicides. But it is a Japanese movie, and that means it has all of these things except the outward show of passion. There is no desperate emotional clinging together, no rushing into each others’ arms. There are no screaming matches, no fights, no storming out of rooms, nor any driving or running madly away into the night. Even though pottery is a significant thematic element of the story, no one throws dishes at the wall or at each other. We do see the illicit couple in bed together, which you still would not see in American movies until the Code began to crack in the mid sixties, but they are talking and only hold hands. There is only one very chaste kiss. It even violates Chekhov’s rule that if you bring a gun on stage it has to go off before the ending.
The wealthy Misugi (Shin Saburi) has a beautiful young wife Midori (Mariko Okada) but is attracted to a picture of her cousin Saiko (Fujiko Yamamoto). After a stranger appears at Saiko’s home with a child she claims belongs to Saiko’s husband, Saiko takes the child but divorces him. Later, meeting Misugi, they share an attraction and determine to “be bad together,” as the subtitles express it. For eight years the affair continues, each assuming Midori does not know, but she had in fact seen them boarding the train for their very first tryst. Things eventually fall apart for all when Saiko understands that she still loves her first husband, whom she has refused to see all these years, but whose remarriage to another drives her to suicide.
For Americans watching, it can be a difficult though fascinating movie, primarily because we expect some kind of explosion sooner or later, but it is precisely that lack of explosiveness that on second thought makes it most interesting. It is not a movie that reveals hidden depths as we think about it but rather a movie that reveals how deeply ingrained are our own cultural expectations.
Lacking the long history of the Japanese audience relationship with Shin Saburi, it is also hard for our eyes to see him as the great romantic passion of a woman half his age; Saiko is independently wealthy and does not need a “patron,” nor is she a version of the Insect Woman looking for a father figure.
Heinosuke Gosho directs unobtrusively and sensitively, but with its focus essentially on only three people, the movie seems to lack the complexity and depth of some of his earlier masterpieces. The emotions are intense, but the expressions of those emotions are so restrained that we feel we are missing something very important, as if the “real” story is happening behind a screen.
The movie also reminds us how often looks can be deceiving in Japanese modern-dress films. Midori is always dressed in the height of modern fashion, living in the epitome of the fifties American house, but she is the wife who has the arranged marriage. Though barely a third of Masugi’s age, she struggles constantly to be the perfect traditional wife and to refuse to ask for a divorce even after she is well aware of the affair and of his lack of physical interest in her. She even acts as the go-between for another couple’s arranged marriage. Saiko by contrast lives in a most traditional home and always dresses in kimono. But she is the one who married for love, which required her husband to be adopted into the family, and she is the one who refuses to go through the motions and throws her husband out, over a dalliance he had long before she ever met him.
So many questions go unanswered: Why does Misugi marry the 20-year-old Midori if he has no real interest in her, even sexually (which seems clear from the very first scene)? There are very few men, middle-aged or otherwise, who wouldn’t want to leap into bed constantly with Mariko Okada at this age, even if she weren’t eager to satisfy your every whim and remake her own personality to whatever you want her to be as Midori is. Why does Saiko keep the child after throwing out her husband; why not send her along with him or find another relative to take the child? Why does the adopted child suddenly decide that Midori is the villain in the piece? And why is it called Hunting Rifle, since we never see the rifle being used?
The only currently available version is on YouTube, but while watchable it is fairly low resolution and much faded, so we can’t enjoy the color that seems to be so much a part of the film’s plan, much as has happened with Gosho’s Yellow Crow. That is why I haven’t included any screen captures. Some of the subtlety of the film may also be missing because of the sub-titles that often seem to be machine translated. Nevertheless, it remains interesting on its own, as well as an excellent demonstration of the difference between Japanese and Euro/American approaches to a similar story.
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One of the reasons I enjoy movies from other cultures is that I can’t predict the outcomes, because there is no Hollywood production code distorting reality, and the moral/cultural values are not based on the dominant European/North American religious tradition. Hunting Rifle is interesting because it seems so much like an American movie — visually — but does not follow well-worn paths. In an American movie, the betrayed wife (betrayed by her husband and her close relative) would be a non-entity (e.g., Intermezzo) or the victim/heroine. Here, she is somehow reprehensible. The mistress apparently loves her adopted daughter, but she commits suicide in front of her with no thought for the girl’s future. And most surprising for me, the studio did not commission a string-heavy love theme to be played over the opening and end credits — no “Summer Place,” no “Love Is a Many Splendored Thing,” no “Affair to Remember.”
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