future meets past
by
Douglas Messerli
Shinobu
Hashimoto and Yoji Yamada (screenplay, based on the novel by Seicho Matsumoto) Yoshitaro
Nomura
(director) ゼロの焦点 (Zero no shōten) (Zero Focus) / 1961
Visiting them at their home, she
recognizes the building as the same as pictured on one of two postcards she has
discovered in one of her husband’s books before her travels. Yet this visit
also ends in a dead end.
Police suggest that Kenichi may have gone
to a village, Noto, somewhat further north, and Teiko makes that arduous trip
as well, even visiting a famous cliff nearby where many suicides have occurred
in the past. There she also recognizes a second house pictured on the
postcards. Without further leads, however, she returns to Tokyo, leaving
Kenichi’s brother Sotaro (Kō Nishimura) to
further pursue clues.
What Sotaro knows, and she does not, is
that Kenichi had been living 10 days of every month with a former prostitute,
Hisako/Sally (Ineko Arima), who he first met when he worked as a vice cop
during the Occupation, a woman with whom he had intended to break off all
relations in order to take good care of Teiko. Sotaro also travels to Noto, but
is killed there, having evidently been poisoned.
Returning to Noto, she confronts Emmy about
the three missing and dead people, positing a version of events quite close to
the truth: arguing that Emmy, herself a former prostitute whom Kenichi
recognized, killed Kenichi, pushing him off the cliff and then Sally, fearing
that one of them might attempt to blackmail her and destroy her wealthy
marriage. When Sotaro visited, she poisoned him as well.
Emmy corrects the details, but in so
doing, admits her guilt in front of her husband, and so Teiko brings the
murders to justice.
Nomura’s beautifully filmed black and
white work, with its excellent musical score by Yasushi Akutagawa, is a quiet
but excellent noir mystery, and the fact that its detective is female makes it
quite exceptional in Japanese cinema. If Teiko begins as a passive wife, she
ends the tale as a kind of intelligent avenger. And the fact that the murderer
is, herself, a strong woman determined not to have her pass life revealed,
makes Zero Focus a kind of early
feminist work wherein it is the males who are ultimately weak and powerless.
I might add my observation that so many
Japanese films portray women forced into prostitution in order to survive, that
it has almost become a genre unto itself.
Los Angeles,
January 24, 2017
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