THIS REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS.
by Jarrod Jones. This is Re/Play, where we take a fresh look at an older film, TV series, or video game to see if fond memories hold up under remastered scrutiny. This week: Kōhei Oguri’s The Sting of Death, available now on Blu-ray from Radiance Films.
THE MOVIE: The Sting of Death
ORIGINAL RELEASE DATE: April 28, 1990.
NEW FORMAT: Blu-ray disc featuring a high-definition digital transfer of the 1990 film print in an uncompressed PCM (pulse-code modulated) 2.0 audio format. From Radiance Films.
RE/PLAYING: As anyone nearing middle age will tell you, and those who have survived to old age will surely attest, growing older is chaos and hard on the heart. Take the married couple in Kōhei Oguri’s 1990 film The Sting of Death, Toshio (Ittoku Kishibe) and Miho (Keiko Matsuzaka), whose marriage is a shambles after ten years, two kids, and one infidelity. Theirs is the kind of mess that accumulates over years of lies, disappointment, anxiety, and fear. You don’t see it until you’re sitting in it.
It was Toshio who transgressed, and he was caught. The fallout following his affair is where Oguri’s film begins. We see Miho beside herself with grief and shame, and our hearts break for her. She threatens to kill herself, and we become afraid — not just for her or her husband, but for their two small children (Takenori Matsumura and Yuri Chikamori) sleeping (or not) a mere distance away as she makes her threats.
What follows is a story about two lives disintegrating as one. Family and tradition keep Miho and Toshio together. Love? That’s trickier. Oguri, who has only made five other films, understands that distance and closeness can convey much, so he uses both to maximize the drama. Look at how his scenes are blocked. The closeness of this family, in their small, provincial cottage, sleeping almost on top of each other, yet Oguri keeps his cameras at a middle distance. It gives us a stage-like, omniversal view of their anguish. We absorb a communal pain, scene by scene.
That’s why the close-ups, used sparingly, hit so hard. I counted only a handful of them in this almost two-hour film, and they all hit like they’re supposed to. One of Miho, followed swiftly by one of Toshio, tells us quite a lot about the decade they’ve spent building this precarious family situation and how they’re both stuck with mutual regret and resentment. When the story takes a disturbing turn, and these two begin to manipulate the situation to their advantage — a volleying of guilt trips, mud-slinging, physical violence, and psychological warfare that is not easy to watch — you wonder what’s to be gained. They’ve both already lost. The kids are going to have a rough go of things in the years to come.
So, yes. There’s hate in this home. We don’t know how long Toshio was cheating on his wife (with Kuniko, played by Midori Kiuchi), but we understand that he’s distant to his family with or without his mistress. (His former status as a naval suicide pilot deepens his character, but his feelings as a war survivor are left unexplored.) It’s no wonder Miho goes berserk so often in this story; she’s wailing, throwing herself to the floor in frustration, and there’s her hubby, standing there with this blank expression to greet her.
Pain makes us do desperate, hurtful things. So Miho calls her husband a “hack writer,” taking aim at his profession and pride. She’s read his diary, so she knows Toshio thinks of her as a “frigid wife.” After two children and ten years, the ache she must feel from that. They’ll say and do worse to each other before the end.
This hate takes physical forms — Miho hits her husband, he hits her back, and later, she demands he strike Kuniko for her satisfaction. It’s a twisted situation. It gets worse: in one grueling scene, the couple strip nude in front of each other — the kids, remember, are sleeping just steps from this — and, in their mutual shame, begin a demented game of shared suicide. Neither goes through with it, but when the scene ends, you know what follows probably won’t improve matters. Those poor kids! Thank god for grandparents.
The Sting of Death is based on an autobiography by Toshio Shimao, whose account of his wife’s deteriorating mental state is given a subjective distance by Oguri. He gives an even hand to both people in his film; no one is without sin in this story, which explains that title, a passage from Corinthians. Shimao would convert to Catholicism following his wife’s hospitalization, unique in Japanese culture and a character wrinkle that is also left unexplored in the film.
Oguri has been asked about his ending, which finds Toshio sharing residence at an asylum with Miho, who has been committed there. They’re both shot at middle distance again, looking out instead of in, speaking at each other instead of to. What are we supposed to feel about these two people in this final moment — hope or despair? “Whichever one it is,” Oguri said in a 1990 interview with Positif magazine, “it expresses the solitude that each of them is facing.” If only they could turn to each other.
ACTUALLY SPECIAL FEATURES: Bonus features are sparse, but their quality is clutch. There’s Des cinémas japonais 2 (“Japanese Cinema: New Territories”), an archival documentary by Hubert Niogret (via Films du Tamarin & Filmoblic) that delves into Japan’s filmic ascent on the world stage in the 1990s, replete with talking-head interviews with the likes of Takashi Miike, Hayao Miyazaki, Kiyoshi Kurosawa, and, of course, Kōhei Oguri. And speaking of which, stick around for the separate 20-minute interview between scholar and scholar and “Oguri expert” Hideki Maeda and Oguri himself, filmed exclusively for this release in 2023.
RE/PLAY VALUE: Radiance Films puts together another sleek, minimally presented disc, a snug fit for its world cinema offerings. (That’s no criticism; Radiance’s homogeneity in style and presentation puts all films on the same pedestal, wouldn’t you say?) The transfer feels appropriately dim and vivid depending on the state of the story, and the additional booklet, which includes an interview with Kōhei Oguri, lends The Sting of Death a deeper sense of the filmmaker’s intent and approach. (All this and a reversible cover featuring two different designs based on posters from the film’s original release.) For those who seek a better and bigger understanding of late 20th-century Japanese cinema, The Sting of Death is difficult to pass up.
8 / 10
The Sting of Death is available on Blu-ray now. For purchasing information, click this.
Written and directed by Kōhei Oguri.
Cinematography by Shohei Ando.
Starring Keiko Matsuzaka, Ittoku Kishibe, Midori Kiuchi Takenori Matsumura, and Yuri Chikamori.
Screencaps are sourced from DVDBeaver.com.
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