1972 – Page 3 – Windows on Worlds

The Music If the under seen yet massively influential director Yasuzo Masumura had one recurrent concern throughout his career, passion, and particularly female passion, is the axis around which much of his later work turns. Masumura might have begun with the refreshingly innocent love story Kisses, but later he dived deep into the depths of depravity in Blind Beast and of manipulation in Manji before cycling back around the intense freudian character study which is The Music (音楽, Ongaku) in 1972. Based on a novel by Yukio Mishima (Mishima and Masumura – a match made in heaven), The Music is the story of one woman’s corrupted sexuality caused by a series of inappropriate sexual encounters during her childhood.

The film begins with a symbolic title sequence in which a large pair of scissors opens and closes rhythmically before being superimposed over the body of a woman – Reiko, our protagonist. She has made an appointment with a psychiatrist because, she claims, she has strange symptoms including constant nausea which led her to believe she was pregnant though medical doctors can’t find the cause of her sickness. The other thing is she can’t hear music, she can hear voices and sound effects but if music starts playing it’s like she goes deaf. Her psychiatrist isn’t quite convinced by Reiko and can tell she’s misleading him.

Sure enough he asks her to come back and she admits not hearing music was a symbolic way of explaining that she derives no pleasure from sex. Her boyfriend is a good man and she loves him, she doesn’t think the problem is with him, but she simply feels nothing when he touches her and it’s causing a rift in the relationship. This is the “music” she was talking about and which will become a recurrent motif throughout the film. Later, Reiko finds that she is able to derive a kind of satisfaction from sexual acts with men who are either dying or impotent, but should they simply get better she again loses all interest in them.

As might be expected, the reasons for Reiko’s strange behaviour lie in her childhood. Her fascination with scissors derives from a game of rock paper scissors she once played with the boy to whom she was betrothed to marry when they came of age. Reiko is the only girl in the group and when she loses the boys suddenly declare she’ll have to have her “thing” cut off – only she’s a girl and never had one in the first place. This leaves her feeling disturbed, humiliated, and in some way inherently deficient. From this point on she develops a masculine sensibility symbolised by one side of the closing scissors which becomes her own “thing”, leaving her with a desire for both cutting and being cut.

We also discover that Reiko was assaulted at a young age and that she also experienced early sexual contact with a family member as well as witnessing her aunt engage in an inappropriate relationship which greatly disturbed her. In all, it’s not surprising that Reiko is experiencing such a degree of confusion given all of the traumatic events that have followed her since her youth. Involved in an obsessive, incestuous sexual relationship Reiko is unable to move on with a “normal” life until she addresses the true cause of all her problems.

The psychiatrist is wiley guy, he can spot a lie a mile off and he has Reiko’s number pretty quickly. Amusingly, she does our job for us of trying to diagnose herself with the obvious solutions that seems to emerge from the latest story she’s told, only for the doctor to remind her it’s not so simple and untrained people shouldn’t try to analyse themselves. This is a little ironic in some respects as a trained psychologist would probably give much of Mishima’s cod Freudianism short shrift, but it works well enough in the context of the film. Reiko is about as unreliable a narrator as it’s possible to find but it does seem at last that the truth has been uncovered and Reiko set free from her improper sexual desires.

There’s a degree of campness involved in The Music with its heavy atmosphere and overtly theatrical melodrama. Masumura films with a perverse eye, animating Reiko’s recollections like dreams complete with bizarre perspectives and symbolic imagery to complete his Freudian approach to filmmaking. The Music may not be his most accomplished work, but it is nevertheless interesting and a late career return to his most pressing concerns.

Unsubtitled trailer (NSFW):

Female sexuality often takes centre stage in the work of Kaneto Shindo but in the Iron Crown (鉄輪, Kanawa) it does so quite literally as he refracts a modern tale of marital infidelity through the mirror of ancient Noh theatre. Taking his queue from the Noh play of the same name, Shindo intercuts the story of a contemporary middle aged woman who finds herself betrayed and then abandoned by her selfish husband with the supernaturally tinged tale of a woman going mad in the Heian era.

The film begins in a theatrical sequence in which Shindo’s wife and muse Nobuko Otowa appears in traditional dress and declares that she going to pray at a shrine to request vengeance on the lying, cheating husband who’s ruined her life. As part of this, she asks to be turned into a vengeful demon so that she may properly enact her revenge. However, after a while Shindo interrupts the action to return to the contemporary era and a man and woman in bed who keep being disturbed nuisance phone calls which turn out to be from the man’s wife (also played by Otowa) standing in a phone box outside.

The husband and his mistress – a much younger, sexually liberated woman, are given no respite from the unsettling phone calls. Haunted by the unseen figure of the betrayed wife, the couple eventually attempt to move around to avoid her ending up in a strange, otherworldly hotel. They become convinced that the wife has followed them and is telephoning from within the hotel itself despite having been told that they are in fact the hotel’s only guests. In the final sequence of the Noh play, the wife, who is now a demon, finds herself unable to enact her revenge in the way that she would like but vows to await another chance though her demonic powers eventually desert her, leaving her as an invisible ghost with only her voice remaining.

Shindo operates on three interconnected layers each radiating from the original Noh play. First of all there’s the central contemporary story of the adulterous husband, his mistress and the betrayed wife which is intercut with scenes from the Noh play but this is divided too – into a “realistic” depiction as in the wife fleeing through the forest and of outwardly “theatrical” scenes in which the entire stage apparatus is visible with enclosed walls and the musicians seated to the side of the stage area.

In one sense, it’s true that the position of the Heian era wife in this instance in a much harder one to bear than that of her modern counterpart who faces less of the stigma of the divorced woman and probably does have much more possibility of rebuilding her life even if she has made large sacrifices and wasted her youth on an unworthy man. However, just in the Noh play the hurt and resentment born by the unnamed modern woman is enough to develop into a supernatural force in its own right which pursues the new couple not only through the direct means of her phone calls but even begins to haunt them causing a degree of hysterical paranoia in the quite cowardly husband who even starts to see the “ghost” of his wife standing accusingly before him.

The real and the dreamlike theatre of vengeance blur into each other becoming evermore indistinct. By the time the adulterous couple have arrived at the hotel they’ve already entered another realm. Though the real world pokes through occasionally, the hotel itself takes on an ethereal quality with its staff each wearing the white makeup of the Noh theatre and spouting strange, oddly straightforward dialogue. Yet the couple themselves don’t seem to be able to detect the oddness around them or even be able to tell it apart from that which is recognisably part of their world, so caught up are they in the guilt and torment brought about by the unseen presence of the abandoned wife.

Shindo adopts a complicated, experimental structure to explore what is at heart a simple idea – the timeless quality of a woman’s jealousy. Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned and even if not physically present, the spectre of the former wife becomes a disruptive force in the husband’s intentions of leaving her behind to pursue other opportunities with a younger woman. Fascinating yet elusive, The Iron Crown is perhaps best considered with a firm knowledge of the original Noh play in hand, yet its haunting imagery and experimental take on form make it an intriguing entry into Shindo’s diverse filmography.

Unsubtitled trailer:

Tag: 1972

The Music (音楽, Yasuzo Masumura, 1972)

The Iron Crown (鉄輪, Kaneto Shindo, 1972)