Zero Focus

Mystery writer Matsumoto Seicho (1909-1992) was long to the Japanese entertainment industry what Stephen King has been to Hollywood - a one-man fiction factory who supplied material for dozens of films and TV dramas.
One of his most popular novels, Zero Focus (Zero no Shoten), was made into a 1961 film by Nomura Yoshitaro. Now Inudo Isshin has directed a new version that resembles his earlier films, including Josee, The Tiger And The Fish (Josee to Tora to Sakanatachi, 2003) in it focus on its female characters, beginning with a woman whose newlywed husband goes missing.
Set in 1957 and unfolding in and around Kanazawa, one of Japan’s beauty spots, the film evokes the work of Alfred Hitchcock in everything from its saturated colors and portentous, dreamy tone (à la Vertigo) to its spectacular location where a character takes a long, fatal plunge (as in Saboteur and North By Northwest).
But there are also echoes of Douglas Sirk, the 1950s master of the “woman’s picture,” who dramatized the unpleasant consequences for women who violated the era’s social and moral rules.
The story begins with the arranged marriage of the naive, fresh-faced Teiko (Hirosue Ryoko) to Kenichi (Nishijima Hidetoshi), a pleasant, if guarded, man who works for the Tokyo branch of an advertising company. Seven days after their wedding, he leaves for Kanazawa, his former posting, for what he says will be a brief business trip. But when he doesn’t return on the promised day, Teiko becomes worried, then frantic, despite the bland assurances of Kenichi’s older brother (Sugimoto Tetta). She finally travels to Kanazawa alone in the dead of winter to find answers, but realizes she knows next to nothing about her husband’s background. From one of Kenichi’s former colleagues (Nomaguchi Toru) she learns that Kenichi was close to Murota Gisaku (Kaga Takeshi), the gruff president of a local building materials company and a major client and his elegant wife Sachiko (Nakatani Miki), an ardent supporter of a female candidate for mayor who, if elected, will be the nation’s first woman in the post. This pair, however, has little to tell her about Kenichi’s possible whereabouts.
Teiko also encounters Hisako (Kimura Tae), a company receptionist whose ability in English - a rare accomplishment in a provincial city then - is offset by her lack of education. She got her coveted job though a connection, Teiko learns - but how and why?
These women, Teiko starts to understand, are not what they seem - and have connections with Kenichi that go beyond Kanazawa. But she does not know how her investigation poses a threat to certain people - until bodies begin turning up.
Zero Focus is more than a whodunit; its larger theme is how women in the early postwar period struggled against social and political strictures, while trying to escape poverty and, in some cases, their own pasts. It also vividly illustrates how one breath of scandal could blow away their carefully (and artificially) constructed personas.
The three leads - Hirosue Ryoko, Kimura Tae and Nakatani Miki - were cast for their acting skills as well as their star power, as indicated by their shelves of Best Actress prizes. Nakatani, however, gloriously dominates as an upstart provincial aristocrat, her icy, imperious gaze masking a raging ambition - and gnawing insecurity. Sirk would have loved her - his Japanese Barbara Stanwyck.