Zero no Shoten Beauty of the rebel woman

January 3, 2010 · Posted in Japan News

Mystery writer Seicho Matsumoto (1909-1992) has long been on the Japanese entertainment industry, what Stephen King in Hollywood – a one-man fiction factory, provided the material for dozens of films and TV dramas.

Zero no Shoten
Mysterious beauties: Ryoko Hirosue Miki Nakatani, and in “Zero no Shoten” © 2009 “Zero no Shoten” Seisaku iinkai
Director: Isshin Inudo
Runtime: 131 minutes
Language: Japanese
Opens 14th November 2009
[See Japan Times movie edit]

One of his most famous novels, “Zero no Shoten” ( “Zero Focus”), was made in 1961, a film by Yoshitaro Nomura. Now Isshin Inudo a new version is aimed, seem very true to Matsumoto’s novel – unread by me.

Since his feature film debut in 1995 with “Futari ga Shabetteru” ( “Two People Talking”), has Inudo from a mixture of indie and commercial projects. What both types of films often share, but are strong female characters and a visual richness, even on an indie budget.

Thus Inudo was a natural choice for “Zero no Shoten”, leading to its three women heard, and unfolds in and around Kanazawa, Ishikawa Pref., One of the most beautiful spots in Japan in the 1950s.

The film, which recalls a woman on a desperate search for her missing husband newlywed centers on the work of Alfred Hitchcock in everything from its saturated colors and fatal, dreamy sound (a la “Vertigo”) to its spectacular location, where a character takes a long fatal fall (as in “Saboteur” and “North by Northwest”).

But I also caught echoes of German filmmaker Douglas Sirk, the master of the 1950s image of “woman” that the unpleasant consequences for women whose life choices violated the era of social and moral rules, as dramatized the upper-middle-class widow relationship her younger gardener, “All That Heaven Allows.”

Inudo, like Sirk, treats this election – and the penalties for women who make them, with a seriousness that is both right and exciting overripe added. His heroines are all suffering right – but with costumes, makeup and lightning that her tragic, noble beauty emphasize how the violins swell. Call his approach melodrama if you want, but it is an undeniable power.

The story begins in 1957 with the arranged marriage of the naive, fresh-faced Teiko (Ryoko Hirosue) to Kenichi (Hidetoshi Nishijima), a pleasant, if guarded man who works for the Tokyo office of an advertising agency. Seven days after leaving her marriage, he for Kanazawa, previous posts, for what he says will be a brief business trip. But if he does not return to the promised dates will Teiko worried, and then outraged.

Then travel to Kanazawa alone – see the depths of winter – an answer, but realizes she knows almost nothing about the background of her husband. By one of his former colleagues, she learns that Kenichi near Gisaku Murota (Takeshi Kaga), the craggy-president of a local construction materials company and a major customer and its elegant, sharp-edged wife Sachiko (Miki Nakatani) was an ardent advocate of female candidate for mayor who is elected when the nation be the first woman in such a post. This pair, however, little has to tell her about the possible whereabouts of Kenichi.

Teiko encounters also Hisako (Tae Kimura), a company receptionist, whose ability in English – a rare ability to be in a provincial city then – to compensate for their lack of education. She got her coveted job when you are connected, learn Teiko – but how and why?

Understanding these women, Teiko starts, are not what they seem – and have connections with Kenichi Kanazawa over. But they do not know how their study constitutes a danger to people until certain points appears to begin.

One reason the Japanese murder mystery – a hugely popular fiction and film genre is not yet – much farther to the west, the long explanations are often added after the murderer is unmasked. It is as if Hitchcock was too late “Psycho” with a 10-minute discussion of the arresting officer has.

“Zero no Shoten is” no exception to the rule of the genre, but it is also more than a thriller. His major theme is how women are fighting in the early postwar period, against social and political criticism, while trying to escape poverty and, in some cases, their own past. It also shows vividly how blow off a whiff of scandal could be their carefully (and artificially) constructed personas.

The three leads – Ryoko Hirosue (Okuribito “), Tae Kimura (Gururi no Koto”) and Miki Nakatani ( “Kiraware Matsuko”) – are recognized for their acting skills as well as their votes star power to their shelves by the specified Best Actress prices. Nakatani, but magnificently dominates as upstart provincial aristocrat, the icy, imperious gaze masking a fierce ambition – and knawing uncertainty. Sirk would have loved it – his Japanese Barbara Stanwyck.