The Affair

With each 60s era film I see by Yoshishige Yosida the greater my respect for his prowess as a director grows. The latest film I saw was The Affair (1967), starring his wife Mariko Okada as Oriko an a woman unhappily married to a philandering executive. It is an adaptation of a novel by Masaaki Tachihara. It's also a year after her mother's death, and she encounters her mother's lover, a sculptor, Mitsuharu (Isao Kimura) and falls for him. I found the cinematography astounding in this film-inventive and fresh in many ways. For example, there's a rape scene between Oriko and a laborer that is mostly shot through a window in a door that emphasizes the entrapment of Oriko. There's an eerie recurring image of Oriko's mother walking through a vast plain and run over by a driver-less truck. Later in the film there's a scene where Oriko approaches Mistsuharu working on a sculpture outside where her approach is timed with a rock slide in the background. The film is filled with these types of memorable images, Yoshida was certainly one of the masters of Japanese New Wave cinema.