Sonoko (Kyoko Kishida), a bored and unhappy housewife meets the young, beautiful and desirable Mitsuko (Ayako Wakao) at a private art class. She paints a portrait of her, telling the principal that Mitsuko has the "perfect face". Sonoko falls in love with her, and the two engage in a secret and forbidden lesbian love affair. But, Masumura being who he is, this is just the starting point to explore how love can spark utter madness, chaos and death. At first, I thought that Masumura shot Manji after Blind Beast, as both films explore the same themes, only that Manji is more focused and poignant, and was surprised to see that Blind Beast came 5 years later. On the other hand, the madness portrayed in Blind Beast is a lot more extreme, so maybe Masumura was more interested in showing the insanity triggered by love than to dig deeper into the relationships that lead to such hydrophobia.
In Blind Beast, Masumura portrayed love as a debilitating state, almost like a disease that sucks the life out of the pitiable people who fall pray to such an illness. Manji seems to offer that love is nothing more than a power struggle and that alliances and rivalries are the only thing that seem to matter when it comes to romantic relations. To speak with Buck 65, it's "sexual want and its perpetual tug of war" Masumura and screenwriter Kaneto Shindo are interested in, and there seems to be only two outcomes for this: madness or death. Throughout the film, various characters conspire in order to deceive the others (first Sonoko and Mitsuko against Sonoko's husband, then Mitsuko and her husband against Sonoko, then the two women against both their husbands, then Mitsuko's husband and Sonoko against the two others, then the two husbands against the two women, until finally Sonoko, her husband and Mitsuko form a threesome that seals the deal on their damnation) and each time they promise eternal faithfulness to each other, and that they will commit suicide if they can't live up to their word.
Of course they never can and it is only by using the other in order to justify their own deeds that they seem able to survive. Simultaneously, with each bound to another relation, the characters seem to lose their shit a little more, until they appear to be possessed both by the maniac desire they have for each other and the obsessive wish to escape their feelings. Some characters try to get some order into things, as with Mitsuko's husband who negociates contracts with the others that are supposed to regulate their love sick behavior, or Mitsuko who constantly employs drugs to limit the scope of action of the others or herself. But, love being an almost unnatural state of hormonal lunacy, humans can do what they want, once Amor's arrow has pierced their hearts, they are doomed.
Visually, Manji is highly stylized with beautifully composed shots, and expertly edited sequences that can be as long as 5 or 6 minutes, during which Masumura heightens the tension by an increasingly expressionistic framing. Kimonos and traditional inns can be found as well as contemporary automobiles and suits, so that it is never really clear when and where the action takes place. The characters act at times erratic and then romantic, so that the performances vary from intense melodrama to down to earth or, in Mitsuko's case, creepy. The plot moves along swiftly, the twists are always satisfying pay-offs to the sometimes overly elaborate set ups, in one sentence, Manji is a highly entertaining viewing experience that is highly recommended.
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