Ten Women In Black — Ten Women In Black( Blu Ray)
Ten Women In Black is an early-1960s Japanese film that blends drama, crime plotting, dark-at-times satirical comedy, with a sprinkling of ghostly encounters. It regards a suave/ hansom TV producer who has nine mistresses and one wife, and when they become aware of each other, they plan murder, but it’s not as simple or easy as they thought it would be. Here from Radiance, both in the UK and stateside, is a Blu-ray featuring a 4k scan and a selection of new and archival extras.
Ten Women in Black ( Kuroi Jûnin No Onna, Ten Dark Women) is from the year 1961. It was directed by Mie, Japan-born Kon Ichikawa. Between the mid 1930’s and the early 2000s, he had an impressive eighty features to his name. Going from screwball/ erotic comedy The Woman Who Touched The Legs (1952), sports doc Tokyo Olympiad (1965), period satire I Am a Cat ( 1975) crime drama Kôfuku (1981), sci-fi adventure Princess from the Moon ( 1987), and mystery The 8-Tomb Village (1996). So clearly a very genre-versatile filmmaker.
The film is shot in crisply moody black-and-white stock. It opens on shadowy nighttime streets, as the ten women of the film's title creep around to meet up- all giving rather noir vibes. We then shift back in time to find out how & why they got to this point.
We soon meet the focus of the ten women’s passion- the sleekly haired, neatly suited, and formally handsome Kaze (Eiji Funakoshi). His nine mistresses start meeting up and chatting together- with one of them reaching out to his small-business-ruining wife, Futaba (Fujiko Yamamoto)- and amazingly, she is aware of her husband’s ways and his lovers, so the ten plot to kill him.
As the one-hour-and-forty-two-minute film unfolds, the group start to plot, but they can’t decide how to do it, and who will do it. Debating whether they should do it altogether… then Kaze is made aware of what's a foot too.
The film blends its drama and dark/ statical comedy well enough, with clear stabs towards gender roles and shifting social mores of the 1960’s. The plot, which at times becomes a tad contrived/ farcical, remains engaging- and you do really wonder what will happen to Kaze and his ten lovers.
Funakosh has a decent character arc, moving from a seemingly always preoccupied/ tired charmer to a twitchy/ paranoid mess. We don’t get to know all of the ten women fully, but the ones we do are painted well enough.
The whole thing is nicely scoped & well directed, with a cool, at times moody twanging guitar score. I’d say that at points the pacing was a little uneven, and some themes/ points were rather overtly repeated/ heavy handed. But Ten Women in Black did certainly feel ahead of its time, in both its darkly satirical humour and stabs at gender roles.
On the extras side, we have one thing on the disc. A filmed appreciation by musician Yasuharu Konishi (Pizzicato Five), driving force behind the film’s 1997 re-release ( 20.47). He moves from talking about how everyone in the film is very photogenic, onto how the film features great design- in both shot use & credit designs. He touches on how the director made a range of different types of pictures over his career, and the great use of monochrome film, a few other things. This interview is fine, though I’m not sure I gained much from it.
Otherwise, we have: The Kon Ichikawa Story ( 78 mins) a 2006 documentary directed by Shunji Iwai, featuring Ichikawa and his wife and screenwriter, Natto Wada.
The release comes with a twenty-eight-page inlay booklet. It includes cast and crew details, a new twenty-two-page article by Yuka Kimbara entitled A Merciless Slap, and transfere notes/ credits.
If you appreciate blends of drama, crime plotting, dark-at-times satirical comedy, and subtle supernatural undertones, then Ten Women in Black will appeal.