Wife of a Spy
Wife of a Spy is in many ways a con. <PERSON> repeatedly withholds key information both from the audience and from his characters, whose motivations become thornier and more complex (but arguably no more clear) the more we learn about them and the legal-ethical-political quandary in which they suddenly become embroiled.
Shot with a disarmingly hyaline digital crispness that belies the fact that it’s <PERSON>’s period debut, the movie is as much about the ways in which film and visual media lie to us as it is about the characters lying to each other. The plot concerns a cosmopolitan Japanese businessman (he pointedly insists on Western fashions in spite of a government mandate) who witnesses the atrocities of the Japanese government during a trip to Manchuria in 1940, and smuggles back both footage of their criminal experiments and a notebook detailing them, in the hopes of spurring international action against Japan. 285
The businessman maintains a hobby as a filmmaker, and in a short film he projects for friends and employees, we witness his wife committing a robbery before being gunned down, a romanticized portent of the violent double- and triple-crosses to come. Meanwhile, a childhood friend of the couple, now a squad leader in the Imperial Army, begins to circle the duo with suspicion, his involvement complicated by the flame he carries for the wife.
<PERSON> draws explicit comparisons between the husband’s amateur filmmaking efforts, the documentary atrocities he smuggles back from Manchuria, the sanitized and propagandistic newsreels which play before shows, and feature films, and the ways in which each distorts and refracts reality so that none can be said to be the whole truth. (Notably, the film in the husband’s possession is heavily truncated, with the fuller and more complete evidence possessed by a foreign associate.)
The digital sheen of <PERSON>’s own work stands in stark contrast to the grainy 16mm film in which his characters trade, but the clarity of his images skillfully distracts from the obfuscatory nature of his storytelling, which during any given scene withholds or reveals just enough key information to leave the ground uncertain underneath our feet, even while we ostensibly move closer to the truth, or closure—things the ending pointedly denies us. 285