VeteranLight I don't have all the words right now but this film is a work of art.

AnhartLinkin This story has more twists and turns than a second-rate soap opera.

Dirtylogy It's funny, it's tense, it features two great performances from two actors and the director expertly creates a web of odd tension where you actually don't know what is happening for the majority of the run time.

Suman Roberson It's a movie as timely as it is provocative and amazingly, for much of its running time, it is weirdly funny.

Claudio Carvalho In a poor island in the countryside of India, the school teacher Snehamoy Chatterjee (Rahul Bose) becomes the pen friend of the Japanese Miyage (Chigusa Takaku). When his aunt Mashi (Moushumi Chatterjee) wants to marry him with the young Sandhya (Raima Sen), he engages in a marriage commitment with Miyage that becomes his Japanese wife. However, neither he can afford to travel to Japan nor Miyage can leave her old mother alone to travel to India. Meanwhile Sandhya marries and has a son.After fifteen years, she gets widowed and moves to Mashi's house. But Snehamoy is still married with Miyage without seeing each other. When his Japanese wife has cancer, Snehamoy consults Indians doctors trying to find a cure for Miyage. Will they finally be together after all those years? "The Japanese Wife" is a delicate romance about platonic love. The original story is very beautiful, despite the sad and unpredictable conclusion, and for Westerns like me it is a chance to see the costumes and behavior of the Indians. The music score is also very beautiful and suits perfectly to the film. I just regret that the responsible for the subtitles have not noticed that yellow subtitles in white background are absolutely illegible. My vote is seven.Title (Brazil): Not Available

bwing55543 A self-billed "love poem" by Aparna Sen.The movie concerns itself with Snehamoy (Rahul Bose), a Bengali schoolteacher and his Japanese penpal Miyage (Chigusa Takaku). Eventually, they declare themselves married. However, Snehamoy finds that being married to a woman merely through correspondence isn't as easy as he thought.I did everything I could to ignore the sheer preposterousness of the basic premise. The movie never explained how did Snehamoy even met Miyage; there never was a personal encounter between them. The two characters are incredibly shy people; Snehamoy lives with his aunt who is the world to him and Miyage with her mother.The movie's story is told primarily with Snehamoy and Miyage narrating their letters to one-another in heavily-accented English; you know it is the native tongue of neither, so they both keep dictionaries handy when writing letters to one-another. The movie surrounds Snehamoy, so you know everything there is to know about him, and next to nothing about Miyage besides what she writes in her letters to Snehamoy.The movie also had a subplot where a widowed woman (who Snehamoy's aunt once tried to engage him to) and her son move into Snehamoy's house. It was vaguely hinted that Snehamoy and this woman had feelings for each other, but the way their relationship was handled was clumsy at best and bore little to no consequence to overall plot.In fact, that, like many scenes in the movie, kind of felt like it was merely added to pad the movie's length. Another scene that comes to mind is the "kite fighting" scene where Snehamoy pitted Japanese kites that Miyage sent him against local Indian ones. I simply failed to see what implications that scene held for the rest of the movie.Well, the big problem with the story that I was simply bored out of my mind, despite The Japanese Wife being only about 100 minutes long. The characters completely failed to engage me and I pretty much felt that there really was no point to the story. Moreover, every time the movie attempted to elicit some sort of emotion, be it laughter or tears, it totally fell flat on its face.To add insult to injury, Rahul Bose's acting was probably the worst I have seen in recent memory in a movie that was not a Mystery Science Theater 3000 episode. The supporting cast does a generally passable job, but Bose had so much screen time that he was simply impossible to ignore. Of course, having to read a rather lame script didn't exactly help matters.What I did appreciate was the movie's attempt to sort of be multicultural by giving lessons of Japanese culture (to an ostensibly largely Indian audience) at the beginning, but even then that was something the movie just sort of abandoned.Aparna Sen is known for doing rather artsy-fartsy low budget Bengali movies. I personally feel that they often wound up making it obvious how totally in love with themselves they are, and The Japanese Wife was no exception; I think the disc label calling the movie a "love poem" is indicative of that. I couldn't help but feel that Aparna Sen was almost over my shoulder saying, "Of course my movie is great! If you don't like it, that makes you a dumb gorilla incapable of appreciating real art!" I love indie films because most of the ones I have seen truly hold artistic merit, and that simply was not the case here.The movie began with a massive real showing a list of corporations that helped fund this movie. This is the first time I've heard of a pen company helping finance a movie; I felt that this list was shown at the beginning for one of two reasons:1. Sen wanted to say, "Look! We didn't have the money, but these corporations, EVEN A PEN COMPANY, saw what a great movie this would be and helped us bring this piece of art to life!"2. Or they knew not too many people would bother waiting to see all of the end credits to get to a "Special Thanks" list, so they might was well show it at the beginning.OK, it was a functional movie and a lot of effort was put into it, but TJW simply missed the mark. Unless you're suffering from insomnia and need a cure, you're better off watching something else. The Japanese Wife was simply extremely mediocre instead of being "so bad it's good".

MartinHafer Before you decide to watch this movie on DVD, there is something you might want to know. The subtitles are in difficult to read font and are yellow, and at times, they are a bit hard to read. It's hard to imagine that the people distributing the film would do such a haphazard job of captioning the film--and it's a shame.The plot of this film is a lot like the Anne Bancroft/Anthony Hopkins film, "84 Charing Cross Road" in that it is told through a very long series of letters back and forth between the male and female lead. Despite having a very strong attachment, the male and female leads go for many years without seeing each other! Muyage is a woman living in Japan. Snehamoy is a Bengali man living in India and most of the film is shown from his perspective. They are pen pals and through the course of the film they exchange many letters which are narrated for the audience. Over time, they fall in love but cannot do much about it, as they are both poor. Yet, because they are so painfully shy, they do not see anyone in their own country. Eventually they hit on the idea of getting married--though they still have not actually met...and even after their marriage (there is no actual ceremony) they do not meet! Years pass this way as they exchange letters and grow separately...yet together.Problems arise, however, when a widow and her young son move in with him and his aunt. After all, this widow is the same lady that the aunt tried to get Snehamoy to marry years earlier. She, like Snehamoy, is painfully shy...but you can also very slowly see something might be blossoming between them...very, very slowly. And, you can also see the young boy beginning to bond more and more with Snehamoy--seeing him as a bit of a father figure. In the meantime, Miyage becomes ill--so ill that Snehamoy is worried she will die, so he takes off time from work and runs from doctor to healer to try to get them to diagnose a woman living 3600 miles from India (trust me, I recently measured it)! What will become of these nice people? Overall, I was very impressed by the very slow and deliberate pace of the film. It was obviously a labor of love, though some might be a bit put off by the very restrained and emotionally constricted acting. It is a film about people--not about action or great displays of emotion. As a result, I assume many, if not most viewers (who are unfortunately boobs) probably will not enjoy the film very much and much of the film's beauty and artistry will be lost on them. Yes, I am apparently a snob and assume the worst of many viewers--especially teens and the chronically dumb. But, if you are willing to watch such a film, give this one a try. It's original (despite its similarity to this other film) and engaging...if you give it a chance. Just be forewarned, this film, at times, is rather heart-breaking--it's not a predictable romantic feel-good film. Seriously...think about this before picking this film.By the way, there was one aspect of the film I did NOT love. Seeing the male lead apparently masturbating in one scene was kind of yucky. No, they didn't show this but it was clear this was occurring. I did, however, like a scene soon after this where you THINK this is occurring...but it isn't. That's pretty clever.

mowahid_ak I watched this movie when i was in a mood to watch some light hearted bolly-holly cross movie, without reading anything about it. And at the end it turns out that I myself am writing about it. I haven't yet watched Satyajit Ray's "Apu" trilogy, but I have got a feeling that i have already watched him in color. The main strength of the movie is its unpretentious aura, wrapped within a simple story. What makes the whole thing grandeur is the dream like subtlety that the viewer sees through the portrayal of reality. Actors (especially Extras), Cinematographer, Musicians, Screenwriters and the Director have all struck the right chord.