Apartment Wife: Affair in the Afternoon

After watching Sweden Porno: Blonde Animal so you don’t have to, I valiantly dove in the next of 88 Films first four Nikkatsu Roman Porno releases. OK, I started with the film I thought would be worst, I'm still not sure why except sometimes it’s best to see something done poorly to help you appreciate something done well. It’s like how you learn to write films, don’t read or watch the best, the writing is invisible, go to that which is flawed, so you can avoid its pitfalls.

Little did I know before watching it that Apartment Wife: Affair in the Afternoon was one of the first three of Nikkatsu’s Roman Porno films, released in 1971, and was hugely popular in its day – apparently even with critics. But would it stand up to scrutiny?

Housewife, Ritsuko (Kazuko Shirakawa), is bored. Her workaholic husband, Ryohei (Tatsuya Hamaguchi), cannot satisfy her desires, her friends always seem to have better clothes and lives; no wonder then that when family friend, Ichiro (Junpo Sekido), turns up she spends the night with him at a love hotel. Unfortunately for Ritsuko, she is spotted and blackmailed into prostitution.

Within seconds of Apartment Wife: Affair in the Afternoon opening the difference between it and Sweden Porno: Blonde Animal became apparent. OK, there’s some sex, some nudity but less than you might see in Branded to Kill for example, but there’s a sense of the cinematic and more importantly, even if I knew nothing about what was to happen, I could guess, and could appreciate there would be a reason for Ritsuko, perhaps to spend her afternoon having ‘affairs’ with other men because what’s made clear is that her husband, Ryohei, is interested in his own gratification, not hers, he has work, you know, it’s tiring... It’s also intriguing because it’s rare that female sexuality is explored in films and Apartment Wife makes it known in no uncertain terms that she is unhappy sexually.  Also, how it is done, it’s not shouting about it, it’s straightforward: what about me? Unlike the "anybody will apparently sleep with anyone for no clearly defined reason" theme of Blonde Animal, there's an attempt here in Apartment Wife to think about the dramas going on within the characters. True, not everyone is three-dimensional, but that said no one is a stereotype either. The blackmailers are not vicious, sneering, lascivious arseholes, which they could easily have been shown to be, a bit like the pimps of the later Female Prisoner Scorpion films. That’s never a good look.  

If anything, when Ritsuko is blackmailed by her neighbour (warning to all: don’t trust your richer neighbours, they are clearly secret pimps) after seeing her go into a hotel with Ichiro, she isn’t strong-armed into it, it’s described more as a way to earn some cash and most importantly feel sexually fulfilled; there’s a weird absence of malice to it. Yes, there is coercion, but there is no violence and that I found an intriguing tack because it made me think of Shinya Tsukamoto’s film A Snake of June. Yes, in part this is due to the vibrator sequence in Apartment Wife, but the coercion into sex made me wonder if there was not something of an influence on Shinya Tsukamoto’s film, and to an extent Apartment Wife is a bit of a spiritual companion. A Snake of June is a film that is about emotional and sexual emancipation and there’s an aspect of that to Apartment Wife, of a woman in the first moments of the film announcing she wants to get off and finding her won way when her husband is indifferent to her needs. When you then consider her male clients seem filmed more like afternoon lovers than anything, one-afternoon stands who happen to pay cash for sex. Again, there is no violence, no malice to them, no abuse nor belittlement of Ritsuko.

As such it’s a curiously sympathetic film, mainly because the narrative focusses on Ritsuko’s inner drama, and the over-arching story has its own logic, even when at its most absurd, like when her husband – whose career is flagging - needs to woo a client, and what better way to bag a client but a woman! Yeah, you can guess where that is going, and it hits you immediately but such that you can imagine the wry smile on the writer's face as they pen the script.

Moreover, Ritsuko is never really judged for what she does. Yes, there is a kind of punishment at the end but that is more a slightly surreal scene, used to effectively close the film, and arguably is about exploding in the fire of desire, rather than for a moment the film lashing out to show her as being an immoral woman. This again returns to the idea of it being a sympathetic tale, because for whatever occurs, there is a sense like A Snake of June, of a person being allowed, albeit against their will at times, to embrace their emotions and desires. The difference here perhaps is that the husband is very much the wage slave who cannot see beyond his own lot. Ritsuko is always self-aware, and even if we see a short sequence of her buying things with her ‘ill-earned' money, it’s not judgmental, more a segue and a recognition that her life would otherwise be empty, because there is nothing here that you can see to fill it.

Cinematically the film is often shot with artificial lighting and is interestingly framed. More often than not – and definitely in contradiction to Blonde Animal – you feel that the focus is on creating a visual mood over sex or nudity. When there is sex, the focus is on trying to give a sense of the desire behind it, rather than a cinematically voyeuristic act.  

Ultimately though there was something unexpected for me in Kazuko Shirakawa as Ritsuko. Capable of vulnerability and desire, and where the character and the performance could be rote nonsense, neither seems true. This matters, as often the film plays with expectations, such as when Ritsuko is made to watch her friend sleep with a man through a two-way mirror, it focuses on her as much, if not more than, it does on any of the bedroom antics so that she manages to run the gamut of emotions. It convincingly centres the film.  

Apartment Wife finds itself in a curious place, occasionally absurdist, sometimes erotic, capable of social commentary and thankfully with a narrative. OK, at just over an hour it’s a pretty short watch but it is an appropriate running time, anything more would have been an exercise in inserting superfluous sexual nonsense, which the film slipstreams. True, this is not entirely an emancipated film, but it’s more nuanced than you would expect. Historically, the film's success is important because it started Nikkatsu spending 17-years making Roman Porno films, and I’d note that there’s a good, 15-minute extra with Mio Hatokai discussing the film and the genre from a woman’s perspective, recognising that these were films made by men, often initially watched mainly by men.