Woman

After the great success of Morning for the Osone Family (sadly, not included in the series), Kinoshita felt more at liberty to experiment with film style and technique. In Woman, shot entirely on location in the seaside town of Atami, Kinoshita creates a bucolic paradise that serves as the unlikely setting for a steamy psychological thriller. A dance-hall girl is invited to a hot spring resort to meet with her former lover. He begs her to run away with him, but his passion hides a darker secret. A kind of odd variant on the popular postwar story about a woman attempting to free herself from the bonds of the past, Woman sets its increasingly desperate portrait of a lethal passion against the backdrop of a Japan trying to return to some kind of normalcy.

Print courtesy of the Tokyo Culture Creation Project in collaboration with the Tokyo Metropolitan Foundation for History and Culture and TOKYO FILMeX.