The Japanese Wife Movie Reviews

If you really care about aesthetics and have been hungering for something that will satiate your finer sensibilities -- battered by now, by the relentless onslaught of kitsch -- you must grab a dekko at Aparna Sen's artful rendition of Kunal Basu's novel, The Japanese Wife. There is such beauty, restraint and minimalism in this akin-to-a-haiku film, it transports you into another world altogether. One, where love can exist without consummation

Quaint and pristine…The only words I could find to describe Aparna Sen’s The Japanese Wife. I imagine only a supreme understanding and belief in the subject on the part of the director can lead to a film acquiring these qualities. It’s tough to predict the box-office result of this film but I do believe there is still a section of audience in Bengal who prefer true cinema to mindless plots, futile glitz, wannabe stars

637 letters, phone calls, 17 years of marriage, but they have not met, read the poster lines of The Japanese Wife, ‘a love poem’ directed by Aparna Sen. Based on a novel by Kunal Basu, presented in spoken English and Bengali, the subtitled film with alternate actors sounds like a depressing premise, but that’s only till you see the beautiful film. Once again, Aparna Sen has taken a difficult subject and created a lyrical, rooted film, full of tender moments

An Aparna Sen film is always special. Like her previous endeavours, THE JAPANESE WIFE [a film in Bengali with English sub-titles] also looks at relationships. Only thing, this time it's about two strangers, who start off as pen friends, exchange letters, get drawn towards each other, even get married through letters, but never meet each other. Despite staying apart and not meeting even once, the couple share an honest and chaste relationship

One of Aparna Sen’s best qualities is that she captures the rhythms of the life of her characters so well that you can’t imagine them doing anything else. `The Japanese Wife’s improbable plot, based on a novel of the same name-- a Bengali schoolteacher falling in long-distance love with his Japanese pen pal-- turns into a beguiling romance in Sen’s skillful hands. Snehamoy ( Bose) teaches at his village school in the Sundarbans.

How much you enjoy Aparna Sen’s The Japanese Wife is directly proportionate to how patient you are. In the age of instant messaging, this is an old world epistolary romance. And it unfolds at approximately the same speed with which a letter moves from Japan to a village in the Sunderbans. The film is slow to the point of being painful. And yet, if you stay with it, The Japanese Wife is a rewarding experience. It’s rich with yearning and sadness

While watching Aparna Sen's latest film The Japanese Wife -- in Bangla, with pretty decent English subtitles -- it's hard not to recognise the director as one who crafts the film, the frames, the shots with extreme care. Moments are carved out meticulously in Sen's films-- as earthily splendid as that of a local medicine man scratching his hairy breast and pontificating proudly, armed with the condescension afforded to

Be wary of the friend who passes off as opinion on a film, comments such as, "It's beautifully shot". Or, “The acting is awesome.” Or, “The film’s good, but kinda long (or slow).” What he unknowingly means to say is the story sucks. Sen’s The Japanese Wife is wonderfully shot, reasonably well enacted, and is sure enough, long (or slow) as hell. Such elements individually draw attention toward themselves because, quite frankly, the script sucks.

This story of a long-distance 'marriage' between a Bengali bhadra-lok from rural Bengal Snehmoy (Bose) and his Japanese pen-pal Miyage (Takaku) suffers from an incurable disease known as Inherent Silliness. Based on a true story by Kunal Basu, this is the ultimate non-romance between two people who thoroughly deserve each other. They're both so annoying and outdated! The couple married to each other for over 15 years