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Poster for Wife (1953)

Wife (1953)

1953 · Feature film · 96 min · dir. Mikio Naruse

Is this the way every woman, every wife, has to take?

  • Drama

Synopsis

Ten years into a marriage, the wife is disappointed by the husband's lack of financial success, meaning she has to work and can't treat herself and the husband finds the wife slovenly and mean-spirited: she neither cooks not cleans particularly well and is generally disagreeable. In turn, he alternately ignores her and treats her as a servant. Neither is particularly happy, not helped by their unsatisfactory lodgers. The husband is easily seduced by an ex-colleague, a widow with a small child…

Synopsis from TMDb

Details

Director
Mikio Naruse
Writer
Toshiro Ide
Composer
Ichirō Saitō
Cinematography
Masao Tamai
Studio
TOHO
Released
1953-04-29
Original title
妻
Running time
96 minutes

Cast & crew

Reviews on the Internet Archive

★★★★★ · Wife (Tsuma), by dir. Mikio Naruse · eve shebang · 2023-03-07

Mikio Naruse may be little known beyond the growing circle of Japanophile movie lovers, though he is cited as the sort of fourth musketeer, 'after' Kurosawa, Ozu and Mizoguchi. I love all those three, but I place Naruse MIkio at his rightful 'ichiban' position, #1 if we have to rate them. Yet, it's rather difficult to talk about a Naruse movie and script and story, because it seems that he’s adept at depicting banality, everyday-life passing by as references to time are often made in Naruse’s movies. but because of this extremely elegant and sophisiticated way of filming an apparently banal…

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