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Apartment Wife: Affair in the Afternoon
[Blu-ray]
Blu-ray B - United Kingdom - 88 Films Review written by and copyright: Eric Cotenas (6th December 2024). |
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The Film
 Housewife Ritsuko (Vengeance is Mine's Kazuko Shirakawa) is left perpetually unsatisfied by her overworked husband Ryôhei (Detective Bureau 2-3: Go to Hell Bastards' Tatsuya Hamaguchi) in the bedroom and everywhere else since for him it is "early to bed and early to rise." Her neighbor Yoko (Erotic Liaisons' Makiko Tsunoda), whose husband is constantly traveling abroad, does not have to intuit the signs of Ritsuko's unhappiness since she has bugged the couple's apartment. Yoko scandalizes Ritsuko by gifting her a remote-controlled vibrator but she notices that the unhappy woman is more attracted to her diamond ring. Ryôhei runs into their old college friend Ichirô (Sumikata Sekido), who is fortunate enough to work for his father and makes additional money on the side selling pornographic audio cassettes, and gives him his phone number so they can reconnect. When Ichirô calls their home and asks to Ritsuko out to dinner in Shinjuku – after she has had a session with the vibrator, feeling less guilty about it because she has wrapped it with a condom she hastily bought off door-to-door marital aides salesman Hatanaka (Stray Cat Rock: Beat '71's Sôichirô Maeno) just to get his foot out of the door – she accepts, knowing her husband will not be home until late. Taking her to a live sex show, Ichirô plies Ritsuko with sake and confesses his love for her and takes the tipsy woman back to a love hotel. Unbeknownst to Ritsuko, Yoko has followed and taken some incriminating photographs. When Ritsuko and Yoko go shopping the next day, Yoko flaunts her ability to spend audaciously before offering Ritsuko the proposition of making money sleeping with men. Ritsuko is scandalized but Yoko threatens to show her husband the photographs; whereupon, Yoko introduces her to her pimp who happens to be salesman Hatanaka. Just as with Ichirô, Ritsuko is reluctant in her first encounters but soon discovers that she can derive enough pleasure and buy enough things to assuage the guilt; however, a series of contrivances one can only expect from a film with such a small cast who all happen to know each other without others knowing they know each other ensures that Ritsuko's secret will be exposed with tragic consequences. Erotic films all over the globe have taken inspiration from Luis Buñuel's Belle de jour, and Nikkatsu did it more than a few times in their Roman Porno line like Hidehiro Ito's Debauchery, and even more recently with former V-cinema director turned artistic filmmaker Sion Sono's Guilty of Romance; here, however, the scenario is used in conjunction with the urban Danchi apartment setting which was a post-war transitional housing unit aimed at single salary man who would move up the corporate ladder, marry, and move on to suburban housing. In practice, the Danchi were often inhabited by generations of family in cramped settings meant for one or two at most. For Ritsuko who married straight out of school to the only man she had ever slept with, the apartment is an urban prison where she wiles away the days waiting for her husband to return, window shopping for things she cannot afford, and gossiping with other salary men's wives. Yoko seems to have become a call girl as much for her materialistic and sexual desires as boredom, and even reveals to Ritsuko that neighbor Kazumi (Yôko Mita) – who Ritsuko assumed filled her days creating the beautiful clothes she wears by hand – is not sexually-unsatisfied at all, she just wants to move herself and her husband into a house (although it is not indicated if he is actually complicit in her prostitution).  While the formula and censorship pretty much assure a downbeat ending, the film does manage to get some points across amid the climactic melodramatics about "respectable" domesticity as a prison, and Ryôhei caring more about how Ritsuko's secret exposed will reflect on him, and that both sides of the couple envy their more carefree counterparts but must be forced by desperation to act on their impulses, their weaknesses exploited by people who seem to be in the same situation as them and are looking for a leg up. Jobbing director Shôgorô Nishimura hit his stride when the Roman Porno cycle came along, moving from Yakuza films and working prolifically starting with Apartment Wife: Affair in the Afternoon and a couple more entries in that series and a specialty in bondage with a few Oniroku Dan-based films including a couple Flower and Snake sequels. Here, he makes use of both blurring by smeared Vaseline on the lenses and creative compositions in sex scenes that simulate a variety of positions without being nearly as graphic as the later Roman Porno and V-cinema softcore sex films. Although shot and set in 1971 – with reference to the "Nixon shock" – the film looks very much like a sixties with its bright color schemes including sex scenes staged against solid color backgrounds and a jazzy score credited to Sansaku Okuzawa that may very well be from earlier works by the prolific composer. One of Ritsuko's (and Ryôhei's) "clients" is Mike Danning, an American actor whose career started with Rodan and consisted almost entirely of mostly-uncredited bit parts in whatever genre was popular (so it was inevitable he would have ended up in a Roman Porno or a pink film like Sex and Fury). 
Video
Unreleased on VHS and DVD outside of Japan, Apartment Wife: Affair in the Afternoon makes its Blu-ray debut courtesy of 88 Films. We have no information on the source of the transfer apart from it being an HD master supplied by Nikkatsu. The 1080p24 MPEG-4 AVC 2.44:1 widescreen transfer looks superficially better than their Blu-ray of Woods Are Wet because it is a brighter, more colorful film; however, because of this there are more little scratches and chips in the emulsion visible at the reel changes. Sharpness and detail are superior due to the more conventional lighting and camerawork that largely privileges static but striking compositions over frenetic handheld movement as seen in the other film. 
Audio
The Japanese LPCM 2.0 mono soundtrack is clean, conveying the mostly post-dubbed dialogue – either Danning's English and Japanese dialogue was recorded on the set or his post-dubbed delivery just sounds more "natural" to Western ears than the more deliberately theatrical Japanese delivery – some sparse effects work (contributing to the chamber drama aspect of the film), and the oblivious-seeming jazz score. Optional English subtitles are free of errors. 
Extras
Extras start with an audio commentary by academic Irene Gonzalez-Lopez who reveals that the film was the studio's introduction "scopophilic world of Nikkatsu Roman Porno" which was preceded by great anticipation by audiences; and, indeed, provides an overview of not only Roman Porno but the social and cultural forces that made it popular. She discusses the voyeuristic aspects of the camerawork, the theme of life in the Danchi apartment complexes and the socioeconomic underpinnings – in addition to noting the influence on human relations by corporate ownership of certain types of Danchi apartments – as well as expectations about domesticity (including the origin of the term "apartment wife"). Gonzalez-Lopez underlines the gender routines established for women transitioning from apartment wife to housewife and the way the Danchi was meant to facilitate it along with the corporate movement of the husband from salary man to executive, along with media coverage of the Danchi that either celebrated or ridiculed this intersection of modernity and personal aspiration (including the emotions created by this social control that facilitate storylines like the film). She also discusses the role of Roman Porno in changing the "apartment wife" from social ideal to genre trope, with the success of the first two films motivating Nikkatsu to turn "apartment wife" into a saga with nearly twenty entries – along with competing imitations, a 1983 video game, and even a 2010 film under the same title that is not so much a remake as a comment on the social phenomena – and the association of director Nishimura with the saga and the genre. She also provides background on Shirakawa as the first queen of Roman Porno and the way her character archetype carries through her other films. In "An Introduction To Roman Porno: Mio Hatokai on Apartment Wife: Affair in the Afternoon" (14:09), the editor of "Nikkatsu Roman Porno: Sexual Aesthetics and Politics" contrasts Nikkatsu's action and comedy films which were built around the studio's male stars with the Roman Porno built around female stars; the latter necessitated by a need to recover audiences from television in the suburbs as well as the independently-produced pink films (Roman Porno being distinguished from pink films not in terms of content but by the studio brand). She notes that in the seventeen years of the cycle, Nikkatsu produced no mainstream films and managed to make over eleven-hundred Roman Porno films and just how unprecedented a major studio turning entirely to adult film production was at the time. While the studio lost a lot of veteran crew, the great freedom to make anything they wanted so long as it met certain requirements in terms of budget, running time, shooting schedule, a sex scene every ten minutes so it encompassed every genre brought several new talents into prominence including director Shôgorô Nishimura. The disc also includes a stills gallery (1:41) and the film's theatrical trailer (1:37). 
Packaging
Limited to the first printing are an Obi strip, the NTSC Region 2 DVD copy, and liner notes booklet with notes from Dimitri Ianni (not supplied for review).
Overall
Apartment Wife: Affair in the Afternoon not only marked the beginning of Nikkatsu Roman Porno as a pop culture phenomenon but also coined the sociological concept of the "apartment wife".
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