Wife
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 who needs some security, and considers leaving his wife.
From the archive
A novel by Fumiko Hiyashi provided that basis for this unusual work by Mikio Naruse -- Wife (aka Tsuma) (1953) tells the story of a decade-old marriage in the process of disintegrating. Opening and closing with the same sequence of the husband silently leaving home, the real focus of the story -- as with more Naruse films -- is the wife, who decides to take desperate measures to try and hold her marriage together, including foresaking her accepted obligations. The result is a drama with some near-comical, battle-of-the-sexes type overtones that are unusual for Naruse, though the tone is still rooted in domestic tragedy and the message seems to be a wider-ranging one concerning the stresses of life in postwar Japan.
Why this is free to watch
Wife (1953) is hosted by the Internet Archive as a public-domain or openly licensed work, which means its copyright has expired, lapsed, or was released by the rights holder. No signup, no payment and no advertising interrupts playback. Nitrate streams the file directly from the Archive and hosts no video itself.
- Director
- Mikio Naruse
- Starring
- Mieko Takamine, Ken Uehara, Rentaro Mikuni, Michiyo Aratama, Chieko Nakakita, Sanae Takasugi, Yatsuko Tan'ami, Hajime Izu
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