Review: Wife of a Spy’s Cloak-and-Dagger Intrigue Wants for More Emotion

Kurosawa Kiyoshi’s Wife of a Spy is an uneasy marriage of domestic thriller, in the key of Alfred Hitchcock’s Suspicion and Notorious, and an insinuating study of a country sliding into fascism. As Kurosawa is the perverse maestro behind Pulse and Creepy, a Hitchcockian thriller is very much in his wheelhouse, which makes it all the more disappointing that he’s indifferent to the central relationships that drive this film, rendering the characters so “mysterious” as to be inscrutable. Kurosawa appears more fascinated by the macro textures of the story than the micro ones, scrupulously recreating a pivotal time and place, yet it’s usually the personal stakes that drive a thriller such as this.

For one, it takes Wife of a Spy a good 45 minutes to elucidate the narrative’s stakes. Set in Kobe in 1940, the film initially revolves around a prosperous silk merchant, Fukuhara Yusaku (Takahashi Issey), and his wife, Satoko (Aoi Yû). He seems to be a model of global-minded capitalism, while she’s the embodiment of the complacent Japanese wife. But there are certain frissons to be found here: Talk of war hangs in the air, one of Yusaku’s British associates is arrested by the military on charges of espionage, and Satoko’s childhood friend and potential love interest, Taiji (Higashide Masahiro), who’s revealed to be an up-and-coming and highly nationalistic military man, at one point criticizes her for daring to even drink foreign whisky.

For a while, then, the viewer naturally assumes that Wife of a Spy will explore a romantic triangle that will be informed by various subtexts. Most pointedly, there’s Japan’s guilt for entering the Axis alliance with Germany and Italy in World War II, as well as the attending culture wars that flare fiercely in elite circles, between those who can afford to have no true political allegiance and those disenfranchised enough to endorse totalitarian dogma. Except that Kurosawa and co-screenwriters Hamaguchi Ryûsuke and Nohara Tadashi keep throwing new ingredients into the stew. There are references to Yusaku’s past as a filmmaker, which feel random despite their foreshadowing of an eventual, and quite cruel, narrative twist. There’s also the matter of Yusaku being implicated in an affair and a murder, which have something to do with a trip he took to Manchuria with his cousin, Fumio (Bandô Ryôto).

The filmmakers lead their audience down a promising path, for a bit, one in which the imperiled woman of a thriller—that is, the person who commands our empathy—will be revealed to be sympathetic to the ascendant Japanese regime for the sake of preserving her chic life. That’s a challenging conceit, getting at how easily we can accommodate evil for selfish motives, yet Satoko’s allegiances frustratingly turn on a dime, as she eventually volunteers to become a martyr for her man. At that point, Wife of a Spy finally, albeit dully, settles into its groove as a sort of comedy of remarriage, with Yusaku and Satoko teaming up for a freelance mission that pivots on Japan’s role in atrocities that echo the Holocaust.

This stretch of Wife of a Spy isn’t without memorable scenes, such as the ones in which Satoko watches film reels of government experiments involving biochemical warfare and vivisection. These moments recall the ghostly pall of Pulse for the way they blend documentary and expressionist horror to evoke something like Japan’s original sin. Other images linger in the mind as well, particularly of the protagonists sitting on a bus with the sun shining through the windows so brightly that it blots them out, almost as if they were being obscured by mass oscillations of society itself. And this association is echoed by a late, devastating image of Satoko walking among an apocalyptic Japan that’s been air-raided into rubble.

That evocativeness makes it all the more frustrating that Yusaku and Satoko’s relationship is so stagnantly conceived. He’s the visionary and she’s the willing foil, and that’s about it. Elsewhere, Yusaku’s potential role in murder and adultery doesn’t faze Satoko, as she asks him about his past, he denies it, and that’s the end of it. Meanwhile, Taiji fades into the background for large stretches of the running time, until he’s needed for a grisly scene.

Wife of a Spy could only have been made by a gifted formalist, but it ultimately wants for a guiding emotional through line. For Kurosawa, that seems to be his outrage at his country’s complicity in atrocity, and we sense that preoccupation in his precise framing of movement, in rigorous manners that the characters maintain to shield their true selves from the government and one another. But Wife of a Spy itself feels immobilized by shame and fury. It could use a streak of live-wire crudeness, a bit of melodrama delivered in an unselfconscious manner. The films that clearly informed Kurosawa here, particularly the World War II-themed thrillers directed by Hitchcock and Fritz Lang, provided such pleasures in spades.