Wife of a Spy (Movie)

In this latest work by Kiyoshi Kurosawa, a Japanese couple’s relationship is shaped by the forces of churning nationalism that surround it.There are a lot of commonplace story elements in “Wife of a Spy.” Childhood friends divided by the beating of war drums. A glib, secretive husband and a distrustful wife. And so on. Combined with its period setting — the movie begins in 1940, at a silk inspection center in Kobe where a British fellow is picked up for questioning — viewers might therefore expect a fairly conventional dramatic thriller.But the director and co-writer here is Kiyoshi Kurosawa, whose approaches to story and genre are always unusual. Soon into its machinations, “Wife of a Spy” begins to thrum with unusual intensity.The husband, Yusaku (Issey Takahashi), who is in the import-export business and had dealings with the Briton, gets a visit from the military as a result. As it happens, the officer, Taiji (Masahiro Higashide), was a childhood friend of both Yusaku and his wife. While Taiji is initially friendly, at a time when Japanese nationalism is swelling, he is also suspicious and disapproving, telling his old friend that he’s too familiar with Westerners, and is rather suspiciously westernized himself.Yusaku is a camera buff, and soon we see him filming a 16-millimeter amateur movie. It’s a heist picture, in poetic noir style, starring his wife, Satoko (Yu Aoi), and his nephew and employee Fumio (Ryota Bando). But his enthusiasm for shooting isn’t purely aesthetic.On a business trip to Manchuria, Yusaku and Fumio surreptitiously film the pages of a notebook filled with details of atrocities committed there, mostly on captive Chinese subjects, by the Imperial Japanese Army: experiments on human subjects, vivisection and more.Satoko learns, piecemeal, of her husband’s activities on the trip. At this point Kurosawa’s movie starts nodding to Hitchcock’s “Suspicion,” albeit understatedly. Adding to her anxiety is her knowledge that a woman came back from Manchuria with Yusaku and Fumio and that she later turned up dead in the harbor.Initially Satoko believes her husband to be a traitor. But once she understands his heart and his aims, she assists him, and they begin living as a truly committed couple for the first time.While Kurosawa’s last film, “To the Ends of the Earth,” was a slow-brewing journey to a young woman’s epiphany, “Wife of a Spy” is something like linear narrative perfection, with every scene perfectly calibrated. As the couple’s best-laid plans hit increasingly hair-raising and heart-sinking setbacks, the movie’s denunciation of war, and its implicit condemnation of contemporary Japan’s blind-eye attitude toward its wartime crimes, becomes more bracing. And the movie’s finale is a masterful evocation of catastrophe that has a low-key echo of Kurosawa’s 2001 horror masterpiece “Pulse.”Wife of a SpyNot rated. In Japanese and English, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 55 minutes. In theaters. More