Impasse

Shingo and Ritsuko have a son called Takashi and from outside they look like a happy couple. But the child was born through artificial insemination, and after a while Ritsuko wants to know who the father is. That question stops being something answerable inside the house; her insistence, his silence and what the two do not say to each other build a spiral. The film tells the matter not as the search for a secret but as how thin the ground a marriage rests on can be. The account makes spaces and empty places the carriers of feeling. Mariko Okada plays the lead in Yoshishige Yoshida’s hundred and one minute Japanese film, completed in 1967.