Tag: Naoyuki Kanno

Zero Woman: Red Handcuffs (０課の女　赤い手錠, Yukio Noda, 1974)

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“Your sense of duty is too strong! The world isn’t a pretty place,” barks an irate policeman, scolding a female officer with a tendency to take things, in his view at least, too far. Yukio Noda’s kidnap drama Zero Woman: Red Handcuffs (０課の女　赤い手錠, Zeroka no onna: Akai Tejo) is on the extreme end of pinky violence and soaked in the political concerns of the 1970s along with all their concurrent paranoia but nevertheless positions its fearless avenger as a lone arbiter of justice in an incredibly unjust world. 

We know this from the start as we see Zero (Miki Sugimoto) almost date raped by an apparent serial killer who has his own torture suitcase and apparently killed her friend. Knowing that he is a diplomat and therefore has diplomatic immunity, she simply shoots him in the balls in the film’s extraordinary opening sequence. But even though it could be argued what she did was self-defence, Zero is kicked off the force and thrown into a woman’s prison for an indefinite period of detention to keep the lid on any possible scandal. Zero is only reprieved when the daughter of a politician is kidnapped by thugs and, wanting to keep things quiet, they need someone to rescue her and also wipe out all of the kidnappers to ensure no one ever finds out.

Kyoko (Hiromi Kishi), the politician’s daughter, claims that her father will do “anything” to ingratiate himself with the prime minister and has in fact already arranged her marriage to his son. Kyoko, however, already has a boyfriend who, inconveniently, is quite obviously a student protestor given his yellow construction hat and other paraphernalia. The pair are accosted while sitting in a car near an old American base, and as Kyoko is gang raped, firstly by the gang leader Nakahara (Eiji Go) who is wearing a hoodie with the words US Navy printed on the back, US planes fly over her as if she were being raped by America in an obvious metaphor for the legacy of the occupation. 

Indeed, the flashbacks later experienced by Nakahara are of his mother whom he describes as a sex worker who worked at the base suggesting a very literal allusion to the corrupting influence of American servicemen. The gang operate out of a bar called “Manhattan” which is surrounded by other similar bars with Western names in a neon-lit area, while they constantly run across various signs written in English in fact peeing directly on a no peeing sign outside a largely disused residential area on the edge of the base where they later take hostage some kind of amateur dramatics / English-language class currently in the middle of a production of Romeo and Juliet. 

Yet the big bad turns out to be essentially homegrown in the form of the corrupt lackey policeman Osaka, and the politician Nagumo (Tetsuro Tanba), who is more concerned with his political capital than his daughter’s safety keen that the police keep everything out of the papers otherwise the wedding will be called off and he’ll have a problem with the prime minister. Seeing a very pale Kyoko, her clothes torn, barely conscious having been drugged by the gang, he says he no longer cares to think of her as his daughter and perhaps it would be better if she simply passed away in an “accident”, instructing Osaka to care of loose ends like Zero too. 

It’s very clear that women’s lives have little currency in this very patriarchal world, something Zero seems to know all too well even if at the beginning of the film she was content to work for the oppressive organisation of the police force though she later tears up her warrant card in disgust. The fact that division zero, operating like a secret police force on the behalf of an authoritarian government, exists at all is a clear indication that this is already a police state though one subverted by Zero who uses her red handcuffs to deliver ironic justice to all those who deserve it. Then again, unlike other pinky violence films there’s precious little solidarity that arises between herself and Kyoko whom she later describes as nothing more her mission objective seemingly caring little for her as a fellow human being. Noda cuts back between the Diet building and police HQ as if actively critiquing the latent authoritarianism of the early 70s society but even if Nagumo gets a kind of comeuppance it’s abundantly clear that nothing really will change and Zero stands alone wilfully freeing herself of the handcuffs of a controlling society. 

The Passionate Spinster (結婚相談, Ko Nakahira, 1965)

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A woman still unmarried at the comparatively late age of 30 begins to go out of her mind while on a hellish descent into vice and crime in Ko Nakahira’s darkly comic satire, The Passionate Spinster (結婚相談, Kekkon Sodan). Shimako (Izumi Ashikawa) begins to feel as if her existence has no value as a single woman who has already aged out of the arranged marriage market, pressured by her family members to settle down and with seemingly no possibility of supporting herself as an independent woman almost as if such a thing could not exist even in the more enlightened world of 1965.

Shimako’s age is her primary problem. We often see her using some kind anti-aging device on her face and reapplying her makeup but as others reveal men in search of marriage are looking for women in their early 20s as is soon confirmed to her when she decides to visit a matchmaking agency after attending the wedding of a close friend, Mikiko (Michiyo Yokoyama), at which she is made to feel like something of an embarrassment giggled at by her younger coworkers who regard her with thinly concealed pity. As a voiceover explains, far more women sign up to matchmaking agencies than men while the age range is typically late 20s. Men’s only condition is that the woman be young, while women are mainly concerned with a man’s height and educational background. Shimako is not particularly picky and simply lists that she’d prefer a man of over 170cm in height, under 35 years old, and a university graduate but despite the beauty with which she is often credited she soon discovers that being over 30 is a deal breaker for most. 

The first man she meets remarks to the matchmaker that she looks “young” for her age and then inappropriately adds that she must be virgin, but eventually decides to marry a 24-year-old woman introduced by his boss. The second, a farmer with an interest in electronics, makes her an offer but is quickly vetoed by his family who feel that there must simply be something wrong with a woman who remains unmarried at 30. The last man the matchmaker, Tonobe (Sadako Sawamura), suggests is a 50-year-old widower named Hidaka (Tatsuo Matsushita) whom Shimako only considers out of desperation but later warms to uncomfortably because he reminds her of the father she lost in the war. Hidaka tells he that once they marry he will be a “father” to her too while taking this as a firm promise Shimako ends up sleeping with him to seal the deal. 

It’s with this that she damns herself, driven into a near nervous breakdown on realising that Hidaka may have been just another married man using a dating agency for extramarital sex. Then again, she’s told this by Tonobe who as it turns out, despite her frequent claims of being “not a yakuza” and concern for her agency’s reputation fearing she will be accused of running an illicit sex ring, is actually doing exactly that. Shimako accepted money from Hidaka and in so doing could be taken for a sex worker. Reminding her that sex work is against the law, Tonobe essentially blackmails Shimako into quitting her office job to work for the agency full time as a call girl, “protected” and “observed” by her two goons one of whom the agency’s other girl, Asako (Michiko Sasamori), suggests is actually Tonobe’s husband. 

In another kind of film, Shimako’s new line of work may have proved liberating, freeing her from the patriarchal ideals surrounding marriage, but it’s true enough that she falls into in a dangerous underworld as a virtual slave of the increasingly monstrous Tonobe whose demonic laughter begins to ring in Shimako’s ears along with all the criticism she’s received from men so far regarding her age. She seeks romantic escape after bumping into office lothario Takabayashi (Masaya Takahashi) who ironically asks her to pose as his fiancée to help him get rid of a problematic bar hostess who’s latched on to him. He promises to marry her too, only it soon transpires that he has massive debts and has been embezzling money from the company which he fears will soon be discovered because of an unexpected merger. Just as Hidaka had offered to become her father, Takabayashi likens her to his mother adding that he was never breast fed. 

With somewhat incestuous overturns, the lines between to blur between the ideals of wife and motherhood as Shimako becomes in effect responsible for a failed man pledging that she will use her body to pay off the debt that Takabayashi owes so that he won’t be prosecuted while believing that he will actually marry her. But her body belongs to Tonobe who reminds her that though she doesn’t care who she marries (an odd comment considering how they met) uncompensated romance is against the rules and she must now be punished in being sent to a further level of hell in essentially being offered up to an ogre in a remote Western-style mansion. Taking on gothic overtones, Shimako unexpectedly finds a kind of fulfilment while essentially embodying maternity in fulfilling the oedipal desires of a young man apparently driven mad who immediately tells her that avatars of his mother have appeared in this place before ominously adding that he has killed all the “fake” ones. Shimako later tells his sympathetic mother that her son was the best of the men she’s met while doing this kind of work and the first she’s slept with whose feelings were pure. 

Through this expressionist sequence which takes place during a gothic, violent storm surrounded by pictures of the Madonna, Shimako undergoes the first of her rebirths in effect giving birth to herself as a woman no longer quite so concerned with the necessity of being married though the film strongly implies she soon maybe. Her maternity is later reconfirmed when she unexpectedly reunites with her former boss, possibly the only “good” man seen in the film in having embraced his own paternity while caring for a wife with a longterm illness and raising his two children. His wife having died, when Shimako meets him again it’s almost as if she were meeting her own father in the memory she described to Hidaka though he is much closer to her in age while also unlikely to have any strong feelings either way regarding either her being over 30 or the scandals surrounding everything that happened to her after quitting the company. 

The film may suggest that it’s partly Shimako who is “old-fashioned”, something she later accuses her mother of being once she discovers that Shimako has been engaging in a sexual relationship with Takabayashi on only the promise of marriage, in contrasting her with the slightly younger Sakata (Kaoru Hama) who scoffs that she wants to put off her (already confirmed) marriage because she’s only 23 and wants to have a little fun first later seen in a nightclub with a gang of rough-looking guys who nearly cart off a near comatose Shimako, but then stops short of actually critiquing the institution of marriage only suggesting that Shimako’s intense anxiety was misplaced because the right man would have come along eventually. It may expose the matchmaking agency for what is really is and in its way fight back against the archaism of the arranged marriage along with the patriarchal social system and its intrinsic ageism but leans towards the view that a woman’s value lies in maternity in positioning Shimako to become a stepmother rather than simply a wife. Nakahira shoots with a noirish intensity before descending into a gothic eeriness in the demonic laughter of the incredibly sleazy Tonobe and creepiness of the mansion even if what Shimako discovers there is perversely a kind of purity that finally allows her to reclaim an image of herself as a pure woman even in the depths of her degradation.