Love Will Tear Us Apart: The Woman Who Wanted To Die (1970)

March 7, 2012 Love Will Tear Us Apart No Comments

Cast: Eriko Shima, Hiroshi Yajima
Director: Kôji Wakamatsu
Country: Japan
Genre: Drama

Editor’s Notes: The following review of The Woman Who Wanted to Die is a part of Rowena’s coverage of the 6th Annual Globus Film Series at the Japan Society in New York, Love Will Tear Us Apart.

Sex entwined with death and politics finds an even more ardent interpretation in this film, which begins with the martial-sexual posturing of a group of men and one woman, presumably before they commit collective suicide. Presumably, for snatches of images of novelist/actor/ultra-nationalist Mishima Yukio and his ritual suicide are interspersed with the sequence as a kind of parallel commentary on it. The spirit of Mishima undeniably hovers above the film, which was made only a few weeks following Mishima’s actual suicide by seppuku (disembowelment) in November 1970 in the face of a failed coup d’état.

…snatches of images of novelist/actor/ultra-nationalist Mishima Yukio and his ritual suicide are interspersed with the sequence as a kind of parallel commentary on it. The spirit of Mishima undeniably hovers above the film, which was made only a few weeks following Mishima’s actual suicide by seppuku…

But all that finally remains from the political group in the film’s prologue are the woman and one of the men, and the ennui that the former feels to lead her to wish for death. But on impulse, Ryoko leaves Ichiro and what follows are the opening credits, with the wedding march booming over a montage of stills of a wedding: Ryoko has married another. The film begins with Ichiro following the newlyweds to a hotel in snow country. While the newlyweds make love, Ichiro meets the hotel’s proprietor, who has a history of surviving a botched double suicide with her own lover ten years ago. In a sequence that flashes back to her memory of that botched double suicide, the film reveals that the lover who could not go through with the pact and eventually abandoned her is none other than Ryoko’s new husband.

…all that finally remains from the political group in the film’s prologue are the woman and one of the men, and the ennui that the former feels to lead her to wish for death.

Filmed in gorgeous black-and-white, The Woman Who Wanted To Die is a dynamic mélange of past and present as well as a direct homage-of-sorts to what could be called the death aesthetics of Mishima. The temptation of and obsession over the idea of a beautiful, violent death cuts across Mishima’s novels, short stories, his short film Patriotism (1966), and film characters. Of course, this temptation, obsession, and beauty are bound up with a call to revolution in the actual world. In The Woman Who Wanted To Die, however, the revolution is found in the act of dying unto itself for those who commit suicide and nobody else. Not unlike a snowball growing in size as it rolls down a slope, the experiences of and attraction for suicide pacts reveal themselves in memory and in dialogue and accumulate in force and magnitude between the four main characters. When the four characters eventually meet, they serve as freak mirrors of the past and present, life and death, for each other, each one still hypnotically attracted to the other to rehash the sadomasochistic pleasure in suicide. Mishima’s death aesthetics come to dominate the dialogue even more as the film progresses, like a scientific, entomological exercise that nevertheless threatens to veer into parody. The reunited couples meet and, like revolutionaries plotting their next move and indulging in self-critiques, they engage in impassioned debates about death, desire, and suicide. The outcome? Let us say simply that not since Luis Buñuel’s Simon of the Desert (1965), with which it has a startling affinity, has rock and roll music punctuated so stridently and insolently a film’s conclusion.

83/100 ~ GREAT. Filmed in gorgeous black-and-white, The Woman Who Wanted To Die is a dynamic mélange of past and present as well as a direct homage-of-sorts to what could be called the death aesthetics of Mishima.

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