THE OPINION OF THE “WORLD” – NOT TO BE MISSED
Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s films often appear as complex constructions, multi-storey buildings, a sedimentation of sensations and meanings. The conventions of cinematographic genres are only trompe-l’œil masking abysmal, and sometimes very abstract, questions. The sacrificed lovers (curious French translation, the film’s original title meaning “the spy’s wife”) is a work built on suspense of an ambiguous nature – both criminal but also, and above all, intimate.
The filmmaker thus makes the mechanisms of the spy film undergo what he had made those of the horror film undergo, not so much to subvert them as to reveal their deep quality, to distort them in order to extract a more form of truth. general, more universal, sometimes more disturbing. Based on a screenplay by the student of Kurosawa, Ryusuke Hamaguchi, director of Drive My Car (Screenplay prize at the last Cannes Film Festival), The sacrificed lovers poetically combines the motive of political betrayal with that of the conjugal bond, of history on the move with that of the most secret feelings.
Kobe, 1941. After discovering that the Japanese army was engaged in war crimes in Manchuria, Yusaku Fukuhara (Issey Takahashi), a respected industrialist, decides to gather the evidence, in the form of an amateur film, in order to convince the international community, and more particularly the United States, to go to war against the Japanese Empire. “Change history before history changes me”, he will say, to justify his refusal of patriotic enrollment in the service of the militarist state. The film begins, at first, on the path of a Hitchcockian scenario, that of conjugal suspicion. Satoko (Yu Aoi), Fukuhara’s wife, gradually discovers her husband’s plans and agrees to help him leave the country in possession of the incriminating documents.
Ramifications of the mystery
But this very programmed postulate will subtly waver on its foundations and be enriched by unexpected developments, unfinished questions. As if the mystery was not called to be clarified, but to deploy ramifications like so many unresolved questions. Doubt sets in, therefore, as to the real motivation of the protagonists, as to the characterization of the links that unite the couple, as to the true nature of the a priori secondary characters: the dead young woman who could have been the mistress of Fukuhara, the young and die-hard secret police chief who may have been in love with Satoko. This sensation is produced just as much by the twists and turns of the story as by the genius of a staging confronting the shots with ghostly potentialities. Doubt is a specter that haunts all the images in the film.
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