Zero Focus (1961)

I really wanted to like this movie. I feel terribly cynical trashing it, and that's why I'm giving it a middling 5. Actually, I'm giving it a 5 because there were some superb performances.

Funny, strange, confrontational and subversive, this is one of the most interesting experiences you'll have at the cinema this year.

what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

One of the film's great tricks is that, for a time, you think it will go down a rabbit hole of unrealistic glorification.

Viewed on DVD. This is a way over par suspense film! Acting is riveting and due entirely to the remarkable performances delivered by the three stunning female lead actresses. The supporting cast (which is huge if you count all the cameos) is also quite good. Film direction is superb and strictly about generating edge-of-your-seat excitement. All stops seem to have been pulled out by the director to ensure the viewer never becomes complacent or comfortable. The pace of roughly the first half of the film is especially dynamic: when characters indicate their intention is to go somewhere, the film immediately cuts to that scene. Much of the second half includes various flavors of flashbacks mostly from the perspective of the lead actresses. Most occur on the edge of a cliff with the ever present threat of yet another over-the-cliff murder! The male protagonist is shown/confirmed to have lead two lives (perhaps with the help of his family members). What has been written off (by the police) as a suicide was really a murder; what was heretofore been considered a murder was a suicide; what was considered to be a suicide or murder may have been just an accident. Original source material exhibits a few artifacts of wear. Black and white cinematography (wide screen) is a bit on the dark side. Score is fine. Subtitles are just right (with a minimum of translational embellishment). WILLIAM FLANIGAN, PhD.

The ideas in "Zero No Shôten" are quite interesting, but the overall film left me rather flat--mostly because the final portion of the film just seemed way too talky and drug on and on for too long.This movie begins with a young bride searching for her husband. It seems that after being married only about a week, he disappeared and his new wife refuses to let go. So, she spends a lot of time searching throughout the countryside for him but keeps coming up with nothing. Then, out of the blue, she learns that the man has killed himself--but that he was using a different name. It seems that he'd been leading double lives--and already was married. But there's more to it than this...and maybe it wasn't suicide after all...and maybe there are more victims.Around halfway through the film, the second wife starts to realize that the suicide isn't exactly as the police have determined. So far, so good. But then the film talks and talks and talks. First, the second wife explains her theory. Then, the man's mistress (yes, there is a third woman) explains what happened. It all takes a very long time and is incredibly talky--as if they need to explain the movie. It's a shame, as the first part of the film was well done--the final was unconvincing and poor.Not at all Hitchockian...though what really IS Hitchcockian? Perhaps Hitchcock's films aren't even Hitchcockian!

Teiko Uhara is a dowdy young woman delighted at finally catching the man of her dreams, Kenichi, after a whirlwind romance her and her new man marry. As Kenichi has just received another big promotion in work, he is called away immediately before they can have a proper honeymoon, he promises to be back in a few days. The days pass and there is no sign of her husband returning, Teiko contacts her husbands employers, who say he has already left for home some time previously. Teiko begins to worry for her husbands safety and decides to travel north to Kanazawa to track him down.Zero Focus is very taut thriller, that just screams of Hitchcock, the plot, the noirish visuals and even the score would all be very much at home in Hitch's repertoire. Nomura pieces together a convoluted script into a mesmerizing tale of hidden identities, murder and prostitution from which Teiko cannot escape. With only a couple of photos from her husbands belongings to go on, Teiko's investigation takes her into the snowy wastelands of the north, a slightly backward coastal area where ragged cliffs act like a magnet to those with suicidal tendencies and provide the viewer with memories of Rebecca. Its into this that quiet city girl Teiko is thrown, with these paltry clues she endeavours to unravel the tragedies of Kanazawa.

This was the first film I had seen by Nomura and constituted a major disappointment. Nomura appears to belong to the static variety of Japanese directors, preferring lingering and beautiful black and white shots over the bravura editing of contemporaries such as Seijun Suzuki or early Kurosawa. This approach really does not fit the material which is a stultifyingly dull and procedural mystery story that at no point rises above the generic, or generates any palpable tension or danger.A point of comparison would be Rebecca by Hitchcock, mostly because of its focus on coastal scenery and echoes of the past affecting a hurried marriage. But this movie lacks any of the sexual or psychological aspects that make Rebecca so interesting. Some of the dialogue and minor performances are appalling. At one point a coastguard turns to a distraught bereaved wife and advises, straightfaced, "Why don't you walk to Noto cliff, It is very beautiful and a common spot to commit suicide." How did that ever get beyond the editing suite? Even the final exposition is ridiculously forced and overlong that I was tempted to fast forward to the end of the ending. One to miss