The 2020 Japanese film Wife of a Spy (スパイの妻) will play at the University of Pittsburgh on October 9 as part of the inaugural SCREENSHOT:ASIA film festival running October 6 through 10. From an NPR review:
Wife of a Spy is a Hitchcockian thriller by Kiyoshi Kurosawa, a top Japanese filmmaker whose work has never gotten the attention that it deserves in the U.S. His heroine is Satoko — superbly played by Yu Aoi — the innocent, big-hearted wife of Yusaku Fukuhara, a prosperous import-export merchant and amateur filmmaker in the city of Kobe.It plays at the Schenley Plaza Tent at 8:30 pm. Tickets are required and can be purchased online.
In a 1940 Japan bursting with nationalistic fervor, the Fukuharas tempt fate by pointedly living in a Western-style house, wearing Western clothes, and sipping Western whiskey. Things get even stickier when Satoko's husband returns from Japanese-occupied Manchuria with a beautiful young woman and evidence of military atrocities.
Faced with this, Satoko doesn't know how to react. She and her husband launch into a marital dance of trust, suspicion and betrayal. Is Yusaku abandoning Satoko for a new woman? Will he sell out his country, and their shared life, by revealing the army's abuses? Will Satoko help him do so, or will she save herself by turning her husband in to the righteous military policeman who has fancied her since childhood? The answer will involve deceit, torture, murder, hidden manuscripts and midnight escapes.
