The Affair

1967, 101 min., 35 mm, B&W, in Japanese with live English subtitles. Directed by Kiju Yoshida. With Mariko Okada, Yoshie Minami, Tadahiko Sugano. Print courtesy of Shochiku Co., Ltd.

With this radical erotic “anti-melodrama”, Kiju (Yoshishige) Yoshida became not only the cineaste of women but the cineaste of one woman: Mariko Okada, starring here as an unhappily married woman confronting the decadent legacy of her mother, who made no secret of her affairs with younger men. Okada faces this inheritance by initiating sexual relationships herself, forming a strange love triangle between her, a sculptor who had been her mother’s lover, and a rough construction worker to whom she surrenders with the reluctant passion of a Japanese Lady Chatterley.

Events unfold—flashes of warmth, wintry blasts of ire—in a patient procession of details and descend calmly into the uncontrolled. All the while Yoshida’s cautious camera hovers over the quakes of jealousy and tidal surges of desire, filmed like the progress of a haunting.

Part of the Globus Film Series:
Mad, Bad…. & Dangerous to Know: Three Untamed Beauties

Tickets
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