Meiji · Taishô · Shôwa: Ryôki onna hanzai-shi

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DIRECTED BY: Teruo Ishii

FEATURING: Teruo Yoshida, Rika Fujie, Yukie Kagawa, Yoshio Kodaira, Teruko Yumi

PLOT: His wife’s suicide inspires a mortician to consider four famous Japanese crimes of passion.

COMMENTS: The fact that Love & Crime begins with a gory autopsy of an attractive nude woman should let you know where it’s coming from. Even more perversely, said autopsy is performed by the decedent’s husband—shouldn’t the morgue have a rule against that?—and he’s not as visibly torn up about it as you might assume. The verdict is suicide, complicated by the fact that another man’s semen was found in the body.

Instead of  a) mourning or b) launching an investigation into his dead wife’s private life, the doctor instead opts to c) travel around Japan and interview people associated with infamous recent crimes of passion, in hopes of gaining insight into his wife’s psychological state (?) These consist of the noirish story of a seductress in a love quadrangle who directly and indirectly murders to gain possession of an inn, the case of Sada Abe (who cut off her lover’s penis and whose story would later form the basis for Nagisa Ôshima‘s In the Realm of the Senses), a serial killer rapist, and a woman who becomes a killer after her husband develops leprosy.

These case studies are all told as flashbacks, and each of the flashbacks themselves consistently include at least one more flashback. This confusing structure can make the stories difficult to follow, especially for modern Western viewers who aren’t the least bit familiar with the true crime inspirations. (At least one reviewer didn’t realize the beheaded woman and the leper’s wife were the same story, and it’s not hard to see how the confusion arises.) Adding to the disjointed feel, the third story—that of the postwar rapist—is completely out of tone with the other two. It’s the only one in black and white and the only one where a male killer is the chief subject. And while the previous two stories ranged from naughty to gruesome, this one is brutally unpleasant and unrewarding. Unlike the more story-based segments that came before, it’s essentially a series of repeated rape/killing re-enactments, with the perp using exactly the same m.o. each time. Why was this segment even included in the doctor’s purported search to find the root causes of female crime? In a classic bit of patriarchal logic, our doctor wonders, “Did the evil that lives within all women cry out to him? Is it women’s bodies that drive men to madness? Or rather, is it women themselves that they drive mad?” Huh?

The wraparound story is terrible, a shameless and poorly-though-out pretext for introducing scenes of sex and violence. But Ishii nevertheless proves a talented stylist. The camerawork is superior. Scenes are thoughtfully framed and staged. There are numerous artistic closeups. At trial, Sada Abe recounts her love affair and as she becomes absorbed in her memories, the background spectators fade into shadow and the camera zooms in on her schoolgirl-prim, spotlit face. The score, which utilizes what sounds like footsteps echoing down a hallway and other atmospheric noises as percussive effects, is impressive. These sleazy misogynist melodramas don’t deserve the cinematic style Ishii expends on them. Fortunately, the prolific director would find material worthier of his talents with his next two projects, the Edogawa Rampo adaptation Horrors of Malformed Men and the supernatural samurai film Blind Woman’s Curse.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…an entertaining mix of sleazy exploitation and arthouse-style direction that, if light on the social commentary you might expect, delivers a solid mix of lurid thrills and strong production values.”–Ian Jane, Rock! Shock! Pop! (Blu-ray)

Love And Crime [Blu-ray]

• Director Teruo Ishii delivers four dramatized tales of real-life crimes of passion involving women across the ages in this grotesque anthology.

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