Radiance Films: Ten Women in Black (1961) - Reviewed

Images courtesy of Radiance Films

Japanese writer-director Kon Ichikawa is probably best known for his antiwar dramas The Burmese Harp from 1956 and Fires on the Plain in 1959 before going on to win the Jury Prize for his film Odd Obsession that same year.  Further still he was commissioned to direct the 1964 Tokyo Summer Olympics documentary Tokyo Olympiad.  While most of Ichikawa’s works including An Actor’s Revenge and The Makioka Sisters have all been given the Criterion treatment at one point or another, it would appear the boutique label Radiance Films have started to get into Ichikawa’s filmography too starting with the world Blu-ray disc premiere of his 1961 surrealist sardonic social satire Ten Women in Black.  A stark tonal and stylistic anthesis to the dark and foreboding Fires on the Plain featuring a murderer’s row of Japanese starlets in one of the funnier offerings of postwar Japan’s dark new wave, it comes to Radiance Films featuring a new 4K restoration and a feature length documentary on Ichikawa by All About Lily Chou-Chou director Shunji Iwai.

 
In a Japanese television station managed by happily married yet secretly womanizing executive producer Matsuyoshi Kaze (Eiji Funakoshi from Fires on the Plain), nine of his mistresses working in the network track down his wife Futaba (Fujiko Yamamoto) to convey the sordid news.  Plotting to murder him with his wife’s consent, the plan is complicated when one of his mistresses on a random fling spills the beans.  Turning to his wife, they decide to fake his own death before the eyes of the mistresses.  Throughout the film, Matsuyoshi daydreams about being on a beachfront surrounded by his wife and mistresses awaiting his execution which the film plays out for us enough times we honestly aren’t sure if he’s dead or not.  Things seem fine for awhile until it arises somehow Matsuyoshi was not only still alive but being sheltered by Futaba, prompting the embittered posse of women to reinvigorate their murder plot with more determination than ever.  All the time, as the film probes into Matsuyoshi’s psyche and inner monologue, we find ourselves just as bewildered as to what drove this man towards entering romantic flings with every female colleague in sight as the women themselves.

 
Visually stunning with masterful black-and-white Daieiscope anamorphic scope widescreen cinematography by Fires on the Plain cameraman Setsuo Kobayashi, a Badalamenti-esque score by The Castle of Sand composer Yasushi Akutagawa and a sharp, scathing script by recurring collaborator and wife Natto Wada, Ten Women in Black is every bit as jet black as his antiwar films while also being kind of impish if not playful.  An investigation into corporatist infidelity in a postwar environment echoing Japan’s (and particularly the Pioneer company’s) technological boom with life and love being compartmentalized and disposed of as easily as changing to the next TV channel, Ichikawa’s biting, snarky and frequently hallucinatory satire of the contemporary male dominated Japanese workplace environment comes across as semi-autobiographical in some ways.  Driven by Natto Wada’s own regard for her husband’s work in the film industry, it plays almost like a coded love letter shared between the two while playing out onscreen as a narrative piece. 

 
Having seen the film Blind Beast which prominently featured Eiji Funakoshi as a perversely psychosexual and possessive sculptor, seeing him as a beleaguered in-over-his-head womanizer who can’t seem to stop himself from fooling around with his employees came as a bit of a surprise.  Seeing him on the other end of the barrel of a gun this time around, knowing what he’d do later in Yasuzo Masumura’s dark sadomasochistic epic, is still a bit of a shock.  The ensemble cast of actresses led by Fujiko Yamamoto is a group of embittered spunky divas who have their own reasons for wanting to stick it back to the man who used and discarded them before going back home to his wife make up a stunning, sometimes overwhelming cast of characters.  One of them is none other than Woman in the Dunes star Kyoko Kishida alongside The Twilight Samurai actress Keiko Kishi.  Though the film is loaded with stern, angry and jealous feminine eyes glaring at Eiji Funakoshi, ultimately it circles back to the central marital struggle now felt between himself and his frustrated but still devoted wife played brilliantly by Fujiko Yamamoto.

 
Released in 1961 by Daiei Film Ten Women in Black was a film that took time, including following the company’s bankruptcy in 1971, for audiences to catch up to its wavelength.  For awhile the film was forgotten as it was rarely shown theatrically after its initial premiere.  Following Natto Wada’s passing in 1983 following a difficult eighteen-year battle with cancer, the film was screened again and soon the film began reaching younger Japanese audiences including musician Yasuharu Konishi of the Pizzicato Five who himself began hosting screenings of Japanese films as a result of that showing.  Very much a feminist picture made at a time when that seemed bold for the Japanese filmgoing public, Ten Women in Black returns to the Western filmgoing consciousness through Radiance Films’ elegant new Blu-ray disc release again featuring the full-length documentary on Ichikawa’s life as well as a collector’s booklet featuring original essay writing and the reversible sleeve art with the OBI-spine.  Radiance continues to excel at what they do in ushering important overlooked if not forgotten world cinema masterworks in the best possible release version to a still-learning cinephile’s hemisphere.

--Andrew Kotwicki