A young woman travels across Japan searching for her missing husband in 1961's Zero Focus (ゼロの焦点). An eerie procedural, it becomes a cool nightmare about fractured lives.
Teiko (Yoshiko Kuga) is entering her late 20s and facing increasing pressure from her mother to get married. Finally she meets a successful ad agency employee named Kenichi (Koji Nambara) who proposes to her. Only one week after their marriage, though, he gets on a train and no-one hears from him again.
A lot of the movie deals with trains as Teiko explains on voiceover the specific train lines she needs to take from Tokyo to Kenichi's hometown of Kanazawa as she investigates his disappearance. She's genuinely concerned about him but there's something dispassionate in her narrative and about her almost expressionless face. Maybe that's not surprising given the circumstances of the marriage.
It turns out Kenichi might not have been intensely interested in Teiko, either, because one thing Teiko finds out is that he'd been living a double life and already had another wife. This fits with Teiko's story and that of a villain introduced late in the film to create a film about people forced by circumstances and societal pressures into leading fraudulent lives. The coolness of the filming and the procedural narrative emphasise the painful, emotional detachment of this kind of hell.
Zero Focus is available on The Criterion Channel.
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