Issue:
. . . at 7 pm on Wednesday, April 24, for Junichi Inoue’s A Woman and War (Senso to Hitori no Onna), with a Q&A featuring the director and his two stars, Masatoshi Nagase and Noriko Eguchi. This extraordinary first feature by Inoue, a longtime Koji Wakamatsu colleague, is based on the 1946 novella by Ango Sakaguchi. The film tackles the irrationality and eroticism of war without a false moment, focusing on the intertwined lives of a novelist without hope, a former prostitute without feeling and a wounded soldier haunted by the sins he committed in China. Terming it “politically and sexually risqué,” critic Tom Mes says, “This independently produced scorcher hits the screen like a bomb blast of fresh, honest air. . . . Wakamatsu’s fighting spirit lives on despite his recent untimely passing.” The director was inspired to tackle the story because “The Japanese people are particularly forgetful. That forgetfulness allows them to ignore inconvenient historical facts and their WWII crimes. Surely, such forgetfulness has led to Japan's shaky relations in Asia now.”
— Karen Severns
(Japan, 2012; 98 min.; in Japanese with English subtitles. Warning: Adult content and violence. Courtesy of Dog Sugar.
