| Japan, 2020 | Thriller/Drama | Mainstream | Trailer |
Sometimes it’s really nice to see a conventional movie. There is no need to be clever, innovative or unforgettable, re-de-invent the whool or needy to épater anybody to produce a satisfatory work. Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Japan’s psychological thriller extraordinaire from the 90s onwards, makes himself comfortable in his well-earned seat and offers us a lovely movie that fulfills all genre conventions and makes place for his personal signature bits with no further effort than that.
The movie tells the real story of Satoko and Yusaku Fukuhara, a couple with a vision during the 1940s belligerant phase of Japanese Imperialism. Taking this premise, Wife of a Spy disserts about the concepts of idealism, individualism, loyalty, commitment and marriage whilst offering us a vision of WWII that is less explored in the screening rooms. The movie is full of moments and conventions we have seen in many other media of related topics, and we expect no less. Thank God, Kurosawa is a professional and manages to find well-threaded outcomes for these, and overall composes a story with enough substance and know-how out of fundamental material.
We should not forget the director’s history. Even being a historical drama, Kurosawa manages to introduce certain bits in Wife of a Spy that show his master skill on psychological thriller and even organic horror. These are adequately curated, so they not only do not break the overall flow of this movie, but also bring a pleasant surprise to the watcher accustomed to this man’s works. They can be purely visual resources, as exaggerated and concentrated lightings, full frontal and sudden shots that penetrate the audience’s souls, or more suggestion-oriented, as light body horror or oniric scenes with colour and sound distortions. These give a very interesting aspect to an otherwise basic script. Some of them can be seen in the trailer above.
The main couple has fantastic chemistry, to the point I believed they could be a real-life wife and husband that love each other to death, even with their discrepances. Their speech is also remarkable, conveying a big broad of emotions, even in the same sentence. If you combine this with the drama-suspense variations of the movie flow, you get a solid filmic experience that needs no more to assure a nice time.
Wife of a Spy, whilst very conventional and mainstream-friendly, is very unique in a secondary sense. It’s a work of an author with a certain know-how who rejoices in his comfort zone for this time, has no pretentions, shows and denounces the deeds of a time and place little explored universally-wise, and is also a couple-oriented movie in all aspects. There is no primacy of one of the members of the main duo over the other, and there is more organic feeling of what a marriage should ideally mean than in any other fiction I can remember to have seen. It’s an odd animal with a common flavour. Bravo.