A Wife Confesses (1961)

☆ ☆ ☆ ½

A Wife Confesses (1961) – Y. Masumura

This is the fourth film I’ve seen by Yasuzô Masumura (who died in 1986) and I still cannot get a proper “read” on him; each film was very different from the others.  Man of the Biting Wind (1960) was a yakuza/juvenile delinquent picture (starring writer Yukio Mishima!) that was part of the zeitgeist of its time.  Giants and Toys (1958) was a wacky and prescient farce about the world of advertising (my favourite Masumura film so far).  Blind Beast (1969), one of his more notorious pictures, was a dark bizarre and lurid story of a blind sculptor who kidnaps a model and forces a relationship on her.  So, I didn’t quite know what I would get this time – but critic Jonathan Rosenbaum reckons A Wife Confesses (1961) is Masumura’s masterpiece.  I’m not so sure.  It is a courtroom drama about a woman (Ayako Wakao) who may have intentionally murdered her older husband on a mountaineering trip (by cutting the rope and allowing him to fall to his death after they had an accident).  Certainly, I can guess what attracted Rosenbaum’s plaudits:  the story is told in a nested flashback structure so that we see all of the events, including brief conversations, as they are mentioned in the trial (or in the concurrent time period).  The way that Masumura manages to keep viewers onside with all of this jumping around is downright magisterial.  Ayako Wakao also turns in an impressive performance as the wife of the title who maintains her innocence even as every other character, including the young pharma exec (Hiroshi Kawaguchi) who she is clearly infatuated with, suspects her to be guilty.  Perhaps it is a florid performance, but it reveals the underlying instability and yearning desire of the wife very well.  The rest of the cast (save maybe the gruff husband (Eitarô Ozawa)) pales in comparison.  Ultimately, it’s a melodrama but one told with a style that broke with the classical tradition of Japanese film (i.e., Mizoguchi, Ozu) and justifiably belongs to the “new wave”.