• 妻は告白する (A Wife Confesses)

6/12/25 (Thurs)

Masumura Yasuzo’s 1961 courtroom drama is one of 20 collaborations with his muse Wakao Ayako. The story is told largely in flashbacks, some of which themselves include flashbacks.

Ayako is on trial for a mountaineering accident. We learn that her mountain-loving husband, suspecting that his wife is having an affair with his client, the handsome young Osamu, had perversely invited both on a mountain-climbing trip to test their reaction. An accident leaves him dangling off a cliff, held up only by a rope tied to both Ayako hanging in the middle and Osamu on the cliff at top. Osama is desperately trying to pull them up, but it is clear that he doesn’t have the strength to rescue both. Ayako takes the decision to cut the rope beneath her, dooming her husband but saving her own life and most likely that of Osamu. (Reminded me of Touching the Void, where a mountaineer cuts loose his climbing partner in order to save his own life.)

The prosecutor seeks to jail her for two years for murder. (Seems a rather light sentence, though Wakao also got just two years in jail in the later Seisaku’s Wife for stabbing her husband’s eyes out. I wonder if they’re just lenient with women.) We come to learn in the course of the trial that she was an orphan who married the much-older husband in desperation for financial stability despite significant mental and physical abuse. He refuses to grant her a divorce and seems to revel in the torment that that causes. It also emerges that he had just taken out a ¥5 million life insurance policy on the recommendation of no other than Osamu. Moreover, Osamu has been seen with Ayako with suspicious frequency, and while nothing untoward has happened (in one case, he simply fixes a shelf for her), it has aroused concern even with Osamu’s fiancée, the daughter of one of his company’s biggest clients.

Several questions thus arise in the trial: Did she intentionally murder her husband for the insurance money? Did she get rid of him to be with Osamu and/or secure the insurance money? Was Osamu in on the plot? Were they even lovers in the first place? The prosecutor argues that the wife’s guilt is compounded by the fact that she should have chosen to die with her husband (though he reluctantly agrees that her decision to save her own life would be fine if the man were a stranger). The police note that she showed little reaction in seeing the mangled corpse, an indication that she had no feeling for her husband and thus planned the death. Ayako does herself no favors in her own testimony when she suggests that she did in fact feel little for her husband.

In the end, she is found innocent, but the real consequence of the trial is that she realizes that she does indeed love Osamu. For his part, Osamu is torn between his feelings and his obligations to his fiancée and company, but he realizes that he is in love with Ayako as well. When she uses the insurance money to rent a respectable room, however, he is incensed. He takes this as an admission that she killed her husband for the money, and finds it crass that she should use the money for her own happiness rather than denoting it to, say, the lab where the husband worked to honor his name. He dumps her without a thought, which devastates her. She begs him to reconsider, telling him she’ll gladly give up everything for him, but is unable to sway him in his stubborn devotion to his fixed belief in what is right. His views are challenged when his fiancée unexpectedly defends the mistress for having the capacity to love, something she says the boyfriend is sorely lacking. Then tragedy strikes.

Wakao doesn’t hold back in a totally committed portrayal of the widow in her need to love and be loved. I’m usually frustrated by the passivity of Japanese women to their mistreatment by men, and indeed Ayako allows herself to be browbeaten, insulted and even raped by her husband. But she ultimately deals decisively with him (she’s “self-widowed”, as someone describes it) and with herself when she sees no light ahead. It’s a highly charged portrait of a woman in meltdown, a striking contrast with the repressed emotions of previous generations (at least in film). Her behavior is almost Italian. She won all five of that year’s major Best Actress awards. Kawaguchi Hiroshi is solid as the lover held back by his conventional perception of right and wrong, which ultimately dooms his happiness, and Mabuchi Haruko excels as his fiancée who proves unexpectedly perceptive at the end. The cast otherwise is fine other than Ozawa Eitaro’s exaggerated performance as the hateful husband (though that’s partly a problem of the writing). Masumura gives a starkly claustrophobic feel to certain scenes, and the dynamic camerawork in the trial scene with the three judges, witnesses, prosecution and others was especially impressive.

While they could have dialed back the flashbacks, the film boasted a solid and carefully constructed storyline, topped with great performances. Recommended.