Woman of the Lake

Yoshishige Yoshida's 1966 film begins with a married woman letting her lover photograph her naked. The photographs pass into someone else's hands and he starts pressing the couple with blackmail. But what the blackmailer wants is not money. Yoshida is not building a thriller. The blackmail is a pretext; the real subject is the woman's relationship with her own desire and her own image. The character played by Mariko Okada becomes steadily less afraid despite the threat, and that is the uncomfortable idea at the film's centre. The visual language is among the most abstract in the Japanese New Wave. The framing is constantly asymmetrical, characters are left at the edge of the screen and the lake is used as emptiness. There is little dialogue and most of it is oblique. Who it's for: those who like the Japanese New Wave and formally demanding cinema. Who it's not for: viewers wanting a clear plot and psychological explanation; the film withholds both deliberately.