Yû Aoi and Issey Takahashi star as a couple caught up in intrigue and suspicion in Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Wife of a Spy
WIFE OF A SPY (スパイの妻) (Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 2020)
IFC Center
323 Sixth Ave. at West Third St.
Opens Friday, September 17
212-924-7771
www.ifccenter.com
Japanese master filmmaker Kiyoshi Kurosawa follows up his gorgeous, haunting To the Ends of the Earth with the tense and gripping thriller Wife of a Spy, opening September 17 at IFC. Photographed in 8K — though screened in 2K — the striking film is set in Kobe, Japan, in 1940, where successful merchant Yusaku (Issey Takahashi) lives with his devoted wife, Satoko (Yû Aoi); the two have also just made an amateur movie together.
With Yusaku off on a business trip in Manchuria with his nephew, Fumio (Ryôta Bandô), Satoko is visited by her childhood friend, Taiji (Masahiro Higashide), who has just accepted a position as head of the military police in Kobe. He is suspicious of Yusaku and advises Satoko that it is not proper for her to wear modern clothing instead of kimono. After a long delay, Yusaku and Fumio return to Kobe with the mysterious Hiroko Kusakabe (Hyunri), but something clearly has changed. Satoko begins to think that her husband might be a spy and a traitor, so she must decide whether to stand by him while under the suspecting watch of Taiji. When she first confronts Yusaku, demanding that he tell her exactly what is going on, he responds, “Don’t ask. I beg you. I haven’t done anything shameful. I’m not made to lie to you, so I’ll be silent. Don’t ask, because I’ll have to answer.” Satoko soon makes her choice, but there are eloquent twists and turns galore as dangerous secrets unfold.
In Wife of a Spy, Kurosawa, who has made such well-regarded suspense films as Pulse and Cure as well as the moving Tokyo Sonata, evokes elements of such classics as Carol Reed’s The Third Man, Michael Curtiz’s Casablanca, Andrew Lau and Alan Mak’s Infernal Affairs trilogy, Masako Kobayashi’s ten-hour The Human Condition, and several Alfred Hitchcock standards — including Suspicion, Notorious, and North by Northwest — none of which makes it feel derivative but instead fits in with the use of film itself in the narrative. The deliberate pace is wholly effective, with a tight screenplay written by Kurosawa, who won the Silver Lion as Best Director at the Venice Film Festival, with Ryûsuke Hamaguchi and Tadashi Nohara, two of his students at Tokyo University of the Arts. Although the story is fictional, the information about what the Kwantung Army was doing in Manchuria is based on fact, something Japan tried to keep under wraps for many decades.
Aoi (Hula Girls, Birds without Names) and Takahashi (Kill Bill, Whispers of the Heart), who previously starred together in Yuki Tanada’s Romance Doll, are both terrific, slowly allowing their characters’ motives to come out as the cat-and-mouse game between Yusaku and Sakoto, Yusaku and Taiji, and Taiji and Sakoto continues. And it’s always a treat to see Takashi Sasano (Nobuhiko Ōbayashi’s Casting Blossoms to the Sky and Labyrinth of Cinema, Kurosawa’s Bright Future and Creepy), who makes a cameo as Doctor Nozaki. The period piece is beautifully filmed by Tatsunosuke Sasaki, successfully capturing the era, and highlighted by an unforgettable moment near the end involving Sakoto, part of what makes Wife of a Spy much more than just another WWII espionage drama.