• ゼロの焦点 (Zero Focus)

4/29/21 (Thurs)

An amateurish murder mystery from 1961, based on a popular book, that wouldn’t pass muster even as a daytime television film. A woman is just a week into her arranged marriage when her husband mysteriously disappears. He is found dead at the bottom of a cliff, an incident that is ruled a suicide – but is it? The women comes to find that there is more to her husband’s past than she had imagined.

The forced dialogue features way too much exposition; the story requires too many unnatural twists, coincidences (like the photos that drop out of a book she happens to pick up) and inconsistencies; and Nomura Yoshitaro’s direction is incompetent, as in the scene toward the end when the husband tries Takarazuka-like to catch his wife as she speeds away. The creators clearly took themselves too seriously: after solving her husband’s disappearance, the main character says in the finale that the events have left her with “an awe for life with its breadth and depth too vast to comprehend, like this northern sea, bottomless and never ending” (quoting the English subtitles). Is that so? This type of posing typifies the piece from start to finish; none of it feels real. The only exception was a lovely late sequence between the husband and his common-law wife, which finally had some real feeling. I would have enjoyed more of that. The setting in winter Noto Peninsula was nice, and the performances by Kuga Yoshiko (wife) and Arima Ineko (friend) were passable. And that’s about it. Not recommended.