"I have no regrets about youth"
"The Most Beautiful"
The Spy's Wife
◎ Got it
Japanese director Kiyoshi Kurosawa often makes people mistakenly think that there is nothing to do with Akira Kurosawa, but in fact, the two are not related to each other except for the same surname. But famous directors sometimes have some strange connections across time and space, and recently, Kurosawa Kiyoshi's "The Spy's Wife" won the Best Director award at the 77th Venice Film Festival Silver Lion Award, which is like the "reincarnation" of a work in Kurosawa's early years.
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In 1946, Akira Kurosawa also made a film focusing on the "wife of a spy", "I Have No Regrets about Youth". It is modeled on the democracy movement that really took place in Japanese colleges and universities during the war, and the main character relationship is also a woman, two men and three classmates, two men have feelings for one woman, and the woman marries one of the men; the background of the times is also during the war of aggression launched by Japan; the male students also chose the two paths of one good and one evil, one dedicated himself to freedom for the anti-war, and the other became an accomplice of fascism.
Of course, "The Spy's Wife" is by no means a reproduction of "I Have No Regrets about Youth", the biggest change lies in the change in the temperament of the heroine, they are all played by popular actresses, the spy's wife Satoko is Aoi Yu, and the youthful and unrepentant Yukie is Hara Setsuko, all of which are temporary choices. Professor Qianjin Yukie returned to his hometown with the ashes of his lover and lived an extremely difficult farming life with his in-laws, who had never met before, while bearing the curse and discrimination of the villagers as "traitorous slaves" and "spy wives". The spy's wife, who was more than seventy years ago, is actually a variant of the tough and loyal samurai wife, but also follows the routine of traditional Japanese female aesthetics: the narrator is particularly sympathetic to women's suffering, highly praises women's sacrifices, but does not act or help.
I doubt the sincerity of Kurosawa's film: after all, just a year and a half ago, he also made "The Most Beautiful," a film about a group of young girls forming a "women's stand-up team" during the war, working hard to produce military supplies for the front line — a political propaganda film that exudes a strong militaristic atmosphere. In the trumpet-playing "Loyalty March", the girls performed like soldiers every day, and the "patriotic enthusiasm" was quite high, and the heroine, Yoko Yaguchi, later became Mrs. Akira Kurosawa.
The time interval is less than two years, Xiaoming students suddenly changed from praising the former model to acura freedom fighter, the speed of the turn is too fast and the amplitude is too large, is it out of sincerity or to submit a letter of submission to the new era? Not easy to say.
Perhaps, a few years later, "Tincture Angel" and "Wild Dog" are his truest feelings about the war, the former is filled with a kind of indissoluble depression and despair, "everything has changed, only this pool of dirty water has not changed"; at the end of "Wild Dog", the gun-seeking police finally pounced on the murderer, the two "dogs" were tired and paralyzed, a group of children in the distance sang nursery rhymes, the "mad dog" suddenly cried with tears in his heart, and the "good dog" fell into confusion after a moment of consternation. Chaos eventually became a peaceful dog, but because of a thought difference, one from the good and one to the other. Akira Kurosawa shouted at the woman who wanted to return to The Black Boss because of fear and servility, borrowing the mouth of the tincture angel community doctor, "Japanese people like to dedicate themselves, this is not right!" ”
Experiencing first-hand the difficulties of post-war "rehabilitation", in these works, Kurosawa invested his reflections on the war. But in the end, it is still from the perspective of "the perpetrator is actually the victim". As for the degree of repentance towards the most direct and innocent of the aggressors in the war? Hard to say, very hard to say. With their German counterparts, with the kind of spine-chilling questioning and almost self-harming introspection, Japanese directors are always so secretive when dealing with anti-war themes, and even occasionally let the unsuspecting audience suffer secondary injuries.
Yasujiro Ozu participated in the invasion of China as a soldier (and as a biochemical soldier who used chemical weapons), but in his self-reports or interviews, he never saw him express a clear confession (let alone an apology) in pain and happiness. In one of his most famous works, there is such a scene, old friends reunite after a long absence, a few glasses of old wine after the belly of the past, and even sing the war song of the year when he served in the Imperial Navy! It was a so-called masterpiece, but every time I saw this paragraph, it was difficult to calm down, and the delicate and mournful taste of the saury was immediately difficult to swallow, these old devils!
So I can never wholeheartedly love this great director who is universally recognized, and aren't artists the fewest people in humanity who are most sensitive to pain, to harm, to injustice? This is not loyalty to art, it is a lack of conscience.
Kiyoshi Kurosawa's "The Spy's Wife" is the most direct and unambiguous anti-war expression I have ever seen. Yes, not on the defeat but on the war, and the first impetus for the action of the characters is indignation, the indignation that "my countrymen committed heinous crimes in a distant country"...
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"If you do this, Japan will lose, and you will become a traitor to the country."
"I am a cosmopolitan, my allegiance is not to a country, but to universalism, and I cannot tolerate injustice."
"The 'justice' you speak of will kill thousands of my countrymen, and I will be insulted as a spy's wife. What about our happiness? ”
"What if happiness is built on injustice? My compatriots have committed heinous crimes in a distant country, and I have seen that if I am chosen by fate, I must do something. ”
This is a key conversation between the husband and wife in the film.
The male protagonist, Yusaku Fukuhara, is a successful businessman, and by chance, he and his nephew Fumio obtain evidence that the Kwantung Army conducted human bacterial tests in northeast China, and decide to make this conspiracy known to the world. The purpose of this is to expose the hypocritical propaganda of the authorities and "impeach them in international politics", while at the same time urging negative Americans to join the war against Japan.
——Especially in this moment of globalization reversal and populism, in a mainstream movie co-directed by famous directors and famous actors, it is very precious to hear the protagonist righteously declare that he wants to be a "citizen of the world", and at that moment, Takahashi's life is simply full of the brilliance of classical beauty.
"The war is coming to an end and Japan is losing, which is great."
When the heroine makes such an inner monologue for the defeat of her motherland, can you not be secretly surprised by her courage?
When everyone was sleeping, she was the first to notice that the heavens and the earth were shaking, and a big bombardment was coming. Everyone in the madhouse runs away in a hurry, only Satoko is calm, she is a spectator who has already predicted the finale. She walked out of the building barefoot, the outside world was already like purgatory, the fire was wailing everywhere, and her back was lonely and miserable—a situation too much like the scene depicted in the Bible: Sodom and Gomorrah were sent down by God for their sins, and the righteous Lot's family was spared, but his wife became a pillar of salt because of her unwilling review.
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"The Spy's Wife" in addition to the main line of the struggle between good and evil, implies a theme of women's growth and gender struggle. This makes its color far more complicated than "I Have No Regrets about Youth", like a sonata of two musical motives that fight, chase, and entangle with each other.
After all, the times are different, Aoi Yu is not Hara Setsuko, and Satoko is not Yukie. If Yukie is more out of admiration for heroes, Satoko, although she is also a so-called "love brain", is more excited to fight side by side with her adored husband, showing a more proactive posture rather than stopping at following and suffering.
Satoko's transformation from silly white sweet to her husband's anti-war alliance is slightly abrupt because the movie is suspicious, but what is more abrupt is that she uses the way of reporting her relatives to give up the car to protect the marshal, and the idea can be described as strange. The couple agreed to go to the United States separately, but Satoko was searched by the gendarmerie when the freighter was about to leave Hong Kong, and the "incriminating evidence" she carried was actually just a love movie made by the husband and wife's uncles and nephews, she was exonerated, but it was her husband who reported her.
Did he do it deliberately to protect her? Or did he never believe she could be a partner in a great cause? Or it was a homogeneous revenge at all — after all, without informing him, she "reported" her nephew Fumio to the gendarmerie, who was brutally tortured.
At the end of the play, the heroine marches on the desolate seashore, crying earth-shattering hysterically. On the other side of the endless sea was her lover whose life and death were unknown, why was she crying? Is it because their cause of destroying their families and relieving difficulties has finally been achieved, and they have to live and die? Is it the madness that after many years of finally being able to return to their true selves and howl? Is it to see compatriots and the motherland deeply caught in the sea of fire and mixed feelings? Is it because the pain of lover's betrayal can finally be completely released?
At the end of the film, two lines of subtitles slowly typed out: "The following year, Yusaku Fukuhara was confirmed to be dead, and the death certificate had traces of falsification; a few years later, Satoko went to the United States."
The author once again lays out an ambiguous maze: Is the ship that Yusaku is sitting on really sunk? Was he cheating? Was he reunited with her?
Everything is a wrong path, leading to a very different destiny. Which one would we like to believe as viewers? Perhaps it depends only on how much faith we have in love –after it has been tested or hurt in that way.
Satoko is also the heroine of the film-in-the-dark drama of "The Spy's Wife", and the lyrics of the song for the silent film soundtrack are as follows: "My whole body is immersed in sadness, which may be a temporary love, but it still gives me happiness, in this desolate world, we ride on the dream ship, but soon sink under the waves of the sun, I can't help but shed a series of tears." 」 Such a brief love, you and I are only a short couple, believing that our hearts are at peace, but burning like fire deep inside..."
Is this the answer to the ambush? I don't know.
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"The Spy's Wife" also ambushed the easter eggs of the fans, and In the film, Kurosawa Kiyoshi explicitly pays tribute to the two predecessors: the young couple watching the movie together, after the news promotion film, the official screening is Yamanaka's "Hanoi Yamanaka Sotoshi"; in another place, Yusaku says to Satoko who returned from watching the movie: "Mizoguchi's film must be a masterpiece, right? ”
I checked the timeline, and the 1940 film produced by Kenji Mizoguchi was "The Wave Girl", which depicted three wives with very different personalities, and Tanaka Seiyo played the female number one who was a very hard-thinking and deeply involved in her husband's career, resulting in various contradictions. Is Kurosawa Kiyoshi a simple tribute? Or is it a secret song with his own work "In the Name of Wife"?
The famous Japanese film critic Tadao Sato, author of "Only Making Movies for Women: The World of Kenji Mizoguchi", once talked about the Japanese films that "should be done at the right time" just after the end of the war, and also mentioned Akira Kurosawa's one.
His overall evaluation of these films with the first theme is not high, but he also admits that "when I was a teenager, I was very touched by some works in this kind of work, such as "I Have No Regrets about Youth". I really wanted to be the intellectual I was portrayed in the film. ”