Love for an Idiot

A middle aged factory engineer takes a very young woman under his protection and sets about raising her as he wishes, then marries her. In time the power between them reverses; he becomes bound to her every whim and in the end loses her. The film does not endorse the man’s project of formation; its true subject is precisely that project and how the wish to shape another person to one’s own liking rebounds. The account was adapted from a novel and comes from the vein of Japanese cinema of the sixties that pushed against the moulds. At no point is the woman reduced to the person the man describes. Michiyo Yasuda plays the lead in Yasuzo Masumura’s ninety two minute Japanese film, completed in 1967.