The remarkably prolific Japanese director Kon Ichikawa made 86 films in almost every genre, from intimate family dramas to large-scale epics to documentaries, reaching his peak of productivity in the 1950s and most frequently collaborating with his screenwriter wife Natto Wada. But few of Ichikawa's films are as difficult to categorize as Odd Obsession (1959), which is at once the blackest of black comedies, a taut family drama, and a thriller, all of it sexually provocative, tragic, mysterious, and discreetly subversive.

Based on a controversial novel by Junichiro Tanizaki, Odd Obsession (released in Japan as Kagi, the novel's title, which translates as "The Key") explores the efforts of an aging family man to overcome his problem with impotence. He gets injections to restore his virility, but when they fail to work he finds that he can be aroused by jealousy. So he maneuvers his young wife into an affair with the doctor who is treating him and spies on the couple having sex, to the distress of his daughter, who hopes to marry the doctor. Meanwhile, the family servant has been observing the household's sexual games with dismay and disapproval.

The emotional undercurrents of the story and the amorality of the characters are played against the elegant formality of director Kon Ichikawa's and cinematographer Kazuo Miyagawa's widescreen compositions, their serenity a stark contrast to the darkness beneath the surface. For a story so suffused with sex, however, Odd Obsession is never explicitly sexual, in accordance with the standards of the era, even as those standards were breaking down. Ichikawa recalled that for Odd Obsession he took as his model French director Louis Malle's film The Lovers (1958). "The most conceptual films are the most sensual," Ichikawa wrote, as opposed to the more traditional "story-based principle of organization...Instead of following a storyline...they present what is essentially a mental landscape."

The cast of Odd Obsession includes one of Japan's top leading ladies of the 1950s, Machiko Kyo, who plays the wife. She played leading roles in films by Japan's top directors such as Akira Kurosawa's Rashomon (1950) and Kenji Mizoguchi's Ugetsu Monogatari (1953), and had even starred opposite Marlon Brando in the 1956 American film, The Teahouse of the August Moon. Playing the young doctor in Odd Obsession is Tatsuya Nakadai, who went on to become a major star, in one of his early film appearances. Nakadai's long and distinguished career includes multiple films with directors such as Kurosawa, Toshiaki Kobayashi and Mikio Naruse, as well as Ichikawa. Writing about Odd Obsession, American critic Pauline Kael called Ichikawa "probably the most important new young Japanese director" and described the film as "a beautifully stylized and highly original piece of filmmaking--perverse in the best sense of the word, and worked out with such finesse that each turn of the screw tightens the whole comic structure."

Odd Obsession earned a Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival for "the audacity of its subject matter," and was one of five international films honored at the 1960 Golden Globe Awards with the "Samuel Golden International Award," the precursor to the Globes' current best foreign film designation.

Director: Kon Ichikawa
Producer: Hiroaki Fujii
Screenplay: Natto Wada, Keijii Hasebe, Kon Ichikawa, based on the novel by Junichiro Tanizaki
Cinematography: Kazuo Miyagawa
Editor: Tatsuji Nakashizu, Kon Ichikawa
Art Direction: Tomoo Shimogawara
Music: Yasushi Akutagawa
Principal Cast: Machiko Kyo (Ikuko Kenmochi), Ganjiro Nakamura (Mr. Kenmochi), Junko Kano (Toshiko Kenmochi), Tatsuya Nakadai (Kimura), Tanie Kitabayashi (Hana)
96 minutes

by Margarita Landazuri