Whether working with Hozo Masomura or Yuzo Kawashima, Fumiko Wakao left behind works that were not obliterated by the changing times. As a "actress myth", behind the entanglement of lust, she can test our deep vision of a female actress.
Text | Tang Zhenzhao
Born in 1933, Fumiko Wakao not only had many fans of her time, but also captured today's young audiences.
Fumiko Wakao
Born on November 8, 1933, Fumiko Wakao, who is nearly eighty years old this year, is an evergreen legend in the Japanese film industry. She has been a sexy goddess in the minds of everyone since her debut, originally in 1971 with the bankruptcy of the big film company has almost faded out of the film industry, on the screen can only occasionally see her cameo performances, in turn in the field of television drama and stage drama shine. However, since the 1980s, many theaters have successively launched some retrospective film festivals of different colors of directors, among which directors Yasuzo Masomura and Yuzo Kawashima are particularly popular, and "The World of Wakao Fumiko and Men" has almost become a fixed propaganda formula, so Masumura with Wakao (equivalent to Kenji Mizoguchi with Tanaka Silk, Naruse with Hideko Takayama, Yasujiro Ozu with Setsuko Hara and Yoshida with Okada Jasmine) has once again attracted attention.
Film critic Toshio Takasaki once pointed out that because many of Wakao Fumiko's old works have been released in recent years, a group of her young fans have gradually reappeared, and many of them are women, who also gave Wakao the nickname of "Ayaya", and "Wakao Whirlwind" seems to have returned to the present and become a popular label.
Existence as an object of lust projection
Reading most of the articles about Fumiko Wakao, I found that if the author was a man, he did not forget to mention from which work he knew her, and nine out of ten took her as an object of sexual enlightenment. Minoru Nagata recalls becoming a wakao fan as a junior high school student because of the Sexual Code of the Ten Generations (1953). Although it seems to be a pornographic movie from the title, in fact, there are no excessive scenes in the film, and Wakao is just wearing a sailor suit, but her charming female voice has made young people have unlimited associations. Wakao became popular because of this work, and his popularity soared, but he was also characterized by the media as a "sexy actress".
In his article "Between Liquid and Solid and Gas", film critic Kio Hiroshi also recalls that when he was a middle school student, he was shocked to see "The Box of Bricks" directed by Hozo Masomura on TV, and fully devoted himself to the role of fifteen-year-old Ichiro (Uchida Kiro) in the film, and was full of sexual expectations for The hostess of the grocery store played by Wakao. In "The Box of Blocks", Ichiro sees that his father has a physical relationship with his sister, and then discovers that Namie, who has always regarded her sister, is actually his father's concubine. As a result, Kuyo, who lived nearby, became Ichiro's maternal symbol and sustenance, projecting a kind of sexual enlightenment-style Oedipal imagination on her. Unexpectedly, Kuyo's children are also descendants of his father, which completely collapses Ichiro's world, and he also believes that all women are unreliable, and eventually he becomes a storm teenager, setting fires in the school to vent his anger. This plot is exactly the meaning of a group of teenagers who are not favored by Wakao, and the nameless fire in their hearts is raging.
Box of Bricks
I think that among the evaluations of Wakao by many Japanese film scholars, Nampok Yuki's observation is unique. In his opinion, Fumiko Wakao, who debuted in 1952, is the first time in the history of Japanese cinema for male audiences to actually experience and feel the existence of sexual desire projection. Compared with the previous famous actresses, Hara Setsuko is too noble, Tanaka Atsuyo will not stimulate the viewer's lust at all, while Hideko Takayama and Kyoko Kagawa are too healthy and sunny; relatively speaking, Wakao's feminine face and well-proportioned flesh can be said to be directly attacking the male sexual imagination. In short, it is difficult for Fumiko to become an object of analysis of male art theory, and for women, she has become an overly gorgeous actress who tends to avoid it. Therefore, in the article "Masamura Hozo and Lustism", Yoshio Yamagawa pointed out that Wakao Fumiko is a beautiful actress who can stop breathing, and such comments can be borrowed to characterize Wakao.
Masuda's 1966 work Tattoo is based on a novel by Junichiro Tanizaki and written by Kanehito Shinto
Gorgeous legends in reality
Of course, with The beauty and star status of Fumiko Wakao, she naturally blooms under the screen. The representative who praised Fumiko Wakao was the great writer Yukio Mishima. Based on his novels, the films Eternal Spring (1957), Miss Senjin (1961) and The Play of the Beast (1964) were all portrayed by Fumiko Wakao. When Yukio Mishima was planning to star in "Kaze no Yoshizaburō" (1960), he explicitly stated that he wanted her to be the heroine. At that time, Mishima's popularity was great, and after it was rumored that he planned to write and act on his own, the studio began to have no peace, and a large number of media reporters gathered every day, and director Yasuzo Masomura was also furious.
"Eternal Spring" is adapted from the novel by Yukio Mishima, and Wakao has three Mishima works adapted into a movie, and the two have a close relationship
During her visit, Wakao Confessed that she hated this situation and hoped every day that it could be completed safely and without incident. In the movie, Mishima plays a gangster, and Wakao plays a pregnant woman, insisting that no matter how she is beaten by Mishima, she will not beat the child to death. At the end of the film, there is a scene where she is hit on the head by Mishima, and as a result, she is unconscious for a moment, and only after going to the hospital for examination is she sure that she is safe. After finishing the shooting, Mishima announced that he would go to the United States the next day, so he had dinner and danced, which showed that the two had a good relationship. Later, when the news of Mishima's suicide by caesarean section came out, Wakao locked himself up at home all day and could not accept such a fact calmly.
Fumiko Wakao married an architect in 1963 and divorced in 1969. Before the divorce, there was a scandal with the male star North Road Xin. In 1976, because of the TV station's dialogue program, she met and began to associate with the Japanese architect Noriaki Kurokawa, who was more famous than her ex-husband. Kurokawa was already a married man at the time, and in order to adhere to the principle of not divorcing his wife until his daughter was 20 years old, his wedding to Fumiko Wakao was postponed to 1983, seven years later. In fact, Kurokawa is very fond of her, Wakao is a well-known car fan, most of her cars are bought for her by Kuroki, and photos of her driving a jaguar in the 60s have appeared in many media. As she says, she shoots in the studio every day, so when she's done, she drives Jaguar with her companions, sometimes to Ginza, sometimes to Yokohama, and lives without a car. It was the most magnificent years of Wakao Fumiko, and the admirers under the fallen skirt followed in an endless stream.
In 1966's Red Angel, Wakao played a nurse at a Japanese field hospital
From Hozo Masomura to Yuzo Kawashima
Today, when we look back at Fumiko Wakao's screen image, it is inevitable that it is inseparable from the works of Shozo Nomura. Starting with "Aoki Lady" (1957) to "Pseudo-College Student" (1960), "The Little Box of Women" (1964), "The Wife of Kiyosaku" (1965), "Red Angel" (1966) and "Thousand Feather Crane" (1969), she has starred in about 20 works by Mamura. The book "Yinghua Actress Wakao Fumiko" is also generally based on The basic discourse system of Shōmura with Wakao. However, the two editors, Inuhiko Shikatada and Ayako Saito, have made an interesting observation that the wrestling between the two in the image actually appears from time to time.
《Blue Sky Girl》
Shikatada Inuhiko points out the secret struggle between Wakao and Maso from a feminist point of view. Masamura's basic themes tend to be male in depicting women who are burdened by love and affection, and to some extent, sometimes tend to be formulaic. Ayako Saito further pointed out that If The performance of Wakao runs counter to the direction of Masomura's repression, she will reverse the characteristics that Masomura intends to give to female characters, showing a tenacious life color. Inuhiko Shikata defines the essence of Wakao as "a combination of desire and democracy," in short, a path of pursuing personal principles based on the premise of abandoning the old system. The so-called desire and democracy have nothing to do with Hara Setsuko, and in Yoshinaga Sayuri, there is only democracy but no desire to support, and only Wakao has successfully combined the two.
Masamura Hozo's 1964 work "Ten Thousand Words"
Therefore, I think that Wakao's best partner for the screen is actually not Hozo Mamura but Yuzo Kawashima. Kawashima is a representative of the Rogue Faction in the Japanese film industry, who does not like to talk about normative rules and likes to rampage to show amazing creative vitality. Fumiko Wakao also believes that the style of Masomura and Kawashima is very different, the former is more dignified and meticulous, and the atmosphere on the set is like being in a factory; on the contrary, Kawashima is full of a Ginza bar atmosphere, and the style of acting is much more spontaneous. General commentators believe that the peak of Wakao's collaboration with Kawashima was the film "Gentle Beast" (1963), wakao nao recognized this work as too avant-garde, and the script written by Kanehito Shinto was too profound for her, and the work was beyond the understanding of the times, even as a lead actor, she did not quite understand. However, her confession just reinforced my impression - she has always been a physical actress, driven by the intuitive perception of the body into the role, so even if she does not understand what "Gentle Beast" means, it does not hinder her wonderful performance in the film.
The Gentle Beast
"The Gentle Beast" features a family of scrooge soldiers and a more terrifying evil woman as the protagonists, and performs a shocking black comedy. The "parallel staircase" that appears outdoors in the film (a very rare setting in The Japanese regiment) and the exaggerated and mutated sealed staircase are unforgettable. The sealed ladder becomes a metaphor for the ladder of desire, on which to chase flashy dreams. The film makes better use of the secret room space in the group, and constantly presents the secret heart of each person through a variety of strange angles, such as the space on the room slab, the screen outside the bathroom, or the closed angle displayed in different areas of the room. At that time, the radiant Wakao Fumiko is the highlight of the film, all the characters are pregnant with ghost fetuses, in the narrow house like a secret room of trapped beasts fighting, attacking and defending are full of tension.
In her essay "Caressing and Attacking", Junko Gosho argues that only Hideko Takayama in Naruse's "When a Woman Goes Up the Stairs" (1960) can match the most classic image of the "Daughter of the Stairs" in the history of Japanese cinema. In "Gentle Beast", the scene of Fumiko Wakao going up and down the sealed ladder, on the one hand, through her graceful and colorful steps to show flattery, and at the same time reflect on the survival of women in post-war Japan through the monologue between the upper and lower parts; on the one hand, after deceiving men, she said that she could take advantage of the sweetness by reversing the weakness of women, it seems that how to survive at this moment is the most important, and when going up the stairs, she used monologues to show that she must first build her own wall at this moment, so that others cannot invade and harass... The sealed staircase is a metaphor for the limited field of japanese women's survival, and to survive, you must put down the moral bottom line and use your innate natural conditions to plan for yourself. I absolutely agree that this scene is a masterpiece performed by actresses in Japanese movies.