 |
| Images courtesy of Radiance Films |
The career of Japanese writer-director Kôhei Oguri while small,
consisting of only six features between 1981 and 2015, nevertheless made a
striking impression in both Japan and among western audiences. Starting with his debut film Muddy River which
earned him a Director of the Year prize in Japan as well as an Oscar nomination
for Best Foreign Language Film before becoming a juror for the 14th
Moscow International Film Festival, the former assistant director turned
realisateur would make in 1990 the Cannes Film Festival Grand Jury Prize winner
The Sting of Death.
A film that garnered numerous top honors before inexplicably
vanishing from sight for decades, the good folks at Radiance Films are proud to
present this modern classic of early 1990s Japanese cinema in its world blu-ray
premiere in a newly restored (to the best of their ability) limited special
edition. For western audiences
unaccustomed to the work of Kôhei Oguri, this new release from the boutique label
represents one of the most haunting studies of postwar social anxieties
plaguing 1950s Japan since Akira Kurosawa’s I Live in Fear though the
madness plays out far differently in Oguri’s epic.
Sometime in the 1950s postwar Japan, battle scarred writer
Toshio (Ittoku Kishibe) resides with his wife Miho (Keiko Matsuzaka) and their
two young children with smaller means than they started with when it dawns on Miho
her husband has been having an affair with their neighbor for the past few
years. Distrustful and paranoid, Miho
confronts Toshio with the discovery and to save his family and marriage he
reluctantly agrees to cut ties with the mistress and stay home by his wife’s side. The compromise is not good enough for Miho
and soon her suspicion of her husband gradually barrels towards an increasingly
insane nervous breakdown that nearly drives Toshio mad while the bystander
children look on at the mania unfolding before them.
Subtly, quietly haunted like an unused episode of Kwaidan
plucked freely from that Japanese horror epic with the aforementioned Akira
Kurosawa postwar epic I Live in Fear in mind, The Sting of Death based
on the novel by Toshio Shimao is an ethereal, somewhat spooky foray into
neuroses and unshakable paranoia. Mostly
a study of how the aftermath of the war baked itself into the fabric of everyday
life, affecting the meagerest of daily machinations, it’s a film that locks you
the viewer in with Toshio and his irate, inconsolably rageful wife Miho who
might be insane but isn’t wrong about her husband’s infidelities.
The first aspect that comes across onscreen is that of a
seemingly perpetual dark cloud cloaking the proceedings, as though we’re stuck
with these characters in an existential Hell.
Shot partially on the Kakeromajima, Amami Islands by Shohei Ando and
given an ever so slightly creepy atonal score by Toshio Hosokawa, the film
moves with a near stillness and silence before erupting into fiery rages
delivered by the angry and vengeful Miho.
Nighttime scenes of soft dusk glow beset by dark rain clouds achieve a
glimmering, almost radiant quality and there’s an overarching sense of artifice
about many of the backdrops.
Of course The Sting of Death derives most of its
power from a ferocious central performance from Keiko Matsuzaka who gives her
all in this piece as a neurotic woman on the cusp of a nervous breakdown who
cannot let go of her husband’s cheating to such a degree it nearly engulfs the
whole family. Also of equal screen
strength is Ittoku Kishibe as her beleaguered husband who wants to comply with
his wife’s wishes for the stability of his family and home but isn’t quite
ready to call off his illicit extramarital affairs just yet. With the combined forces of Oguri’s
filmmaking and the gifted, committed screen performances from the two leads, The
Sting of Death achieves a rarefied dramatic perfection that is
simultaneously directly confrontational and nebulously interpretive.
One of the high watermarks of 1990s Japanese cinema, the
Cannes Film Festival favorite nominated for the Golden Palm as well as the Japanese
Academy Award for Best Film in 1991 was a festival favorite that for whatever
reason never got the recognition in the west it should’ve some thirty years
ago. Thankfully that wrong is being
righted by Radiance Films with their new deluxe limited edition (only 3,000
copies are available), filmgoers keen on Japanese cinema which seems to be
hitting its stride with Americans now have a chance to explore this
clandestine, tragically underseen epic for themselves. While at times the transfer is a little
wobbly and very filmic, this is far and away years ahead of the lousy tape and
DVD releases from before and finally does Kôhei Oguri’s grand masterpiece its
long overdue justice in the eyes of worldly cinephiles.
--Andrew Kotwicki
