Wife of a Spy - Casket, review: cheating on your country or your husband?
Wife of a Spy - Casket, review
Wife of a Spy is the manga adaptation of the Japanese film of the same name (Supai no tsuma) directed by Kiyoshi Kurosawa, which premiered on 8 September 2020 in competition at the 77th Venice International Film Festival , during which he won the Silver Lion for Best Director. A manga that takes us into the cruelty of the Second World War, in which the mistakes of men abandon, where those who participate are called to make choices, where the good of the homeland comes before the personal one and loved ones, where the love cannot always win and where revenge and obsession with victory are the masters.
A Spy's Wife - Planet Manga, review
When did it all begin? The day he went to Manchuria? Or ... The instant my gaze rested on that woman? It all started a long, long time ago.
Wife of a Spy: the beginning of the end
We are in 1940. It is the eve of the Second World War. The Empire of Japan was established in 1889, the main objective of which is to get out of the great period of depression that had put a brake on the country's economic development. In fact, the huge expenses incurred in the decade of the beginning of modernization had put public finance in crisis and created a fertile ground for inflation and rising prices. A policy focused on achieving the well-being of the country and beyond was therefore adopted. On January 16, 1940, Mitsumasa Yonai was appointed prime minister and on June 29, foreign minister Arita Hachirō announced the "Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere" project, which advocates the unity of the peoples of the Far East and countries. neighbors under Japanese leadership. During the Second World War, the Japanese were prevented from wearing Western clothes, traditional dress obligation.| ); }Wife of a Spy - Planet Manga, review
Wife of a Spy: their ideal of justice
Wife of a Spy outlines the cruel and disarming picture of the Second World War and of a family, a wife and a husband, who find themselves, in spite of themselves, to be protagonists of the horror that man is able to provoke, willing to abandon his humanity, behaving worse than an animal without a soul. Satoko and Kobe are not only personally involved in Japan's struggle to win the Second World War, but also protagonists of a personal struggle to overcome the mistrust that has arisen between them and to remain faithful to their love for each other. 'other. A love that seems to be lost forever because of jealousy, of secrets that should never have been revealed and of the surrounding world, poised towards the end caused by the war.if ( jQuery ("# crm_srl-th_culturapop_d_mh4_1").
A Spy's Wife asks us a question: what are you willing to do and sacrifice in order to pursue your own ideals of justice. Who is right and who is wrong? What drives a man to throw away his life and to use those of the people dear to him, to make them mere pawns in his hands? This is war, and this story gives us a clear and terrible picture of it.
Some more information about the manga
Wife of a Spy is a real artistic masterpiece: incredibly drawings real, almost like photographs that paint a landscape of war, the atrocity and horror of a Japan aiming for victory. The narrative structure is not classic and the narration is alternated by flashfowards that throw clues on how the story will evolve, keeping us in suspense and throwing all our suppositions to the wind, and a long flashback in the second volume that tells us what it is really successful in Manchuria. The edition that Planet Maga presents to us is treated in detail: two volumes, enclosed in a slipcase, which incorporates the cover images. the choice of the dark color tone is well thought out, perfect for enhancing the dramatic tone of the story.TV Review: Damian Lewis & Guy Pearce In ‘A Spy Among Friends’
Nothing has quite the same screen allure as a secret world. Espionage is so secret, by definition, that we have to take even its existence as a matter of trust; all we know about what goes on behind the intelligence agencies’ closed doors is what is relayed to us through books, films and series like A Spy Among Friends, based on Ben Macintyre’s book about the British double agent Kim Philby. Presumably, a certain kind of person is drawn to that world where nothing can be let slip outside it. To work for both sides, one must constantly be aware of who said what to whom, who knows what, who saw you where, who remembers you there — that anyone should want that life is a mystery in itself.
A Spy Among Friends – two episodes of which are screening as part of the London Film Festival – reunites Alexander Cary, a writer and producer on the long-running espionage series Homeland, with actor Damian Lewis, who also steps up as an executive producer of the new series. Lewis is best known on both sides of the Atlantic as Homeland’s Nicholas Brody, the Marine Corps sniper imprisoned and possibly “turned” by Al-Qaeda. Here he enters another secret world, but in a very different guise: He plays Nicholas Elliott, an operative with foreign security agency SIS, who also is the closest friend of Philby (Guy Pearce).
While the spies in Homeland were at the edge of the world, teetering on the brink of insanity, Elliott and Philby are at the heart of things, which is not to say it is particularly glamorous. Philby was unmasked as a KGB agent in 1963. A Spy Among Friends takes place in a series of dark offices and drawing rooms that, even on the small screen, look decidedly cold and frequently shabby. Even so, there is no doubting their privilege. As portrayed by writer and showrunner Cary, Philby and Elliott were united by both calling and class. Both were clubbable, debonair, at ease and in no doubt of their own superiority.
Even by the standards of the game, Elliott plays his cards close to his chest. So does Lewis, for that matter, with his Mona Lisa smirk and quietly clipped voice, both calculated never to display surprise. When Philby is rumbled, it is his chum Elliott who goes to Beirut to coax a confession and a deal out of his old friend that would allow him to retire gracefully to the country and save everyone’s face. That is the story, anyway. Even at the eleventh hour, the operatives at SIS – a coterie of Oxbridge men who believe they instinctively understand one another – hope to emerge from this potential scandal with a gentlemen’s agreement.
Pearce plays Kim Philby as if he were born to the role: He is arrogant but winning with it, the center of every party who can drink a bar dry without any faltering of control. It is a shock in the second episode to see him sweating through Elliott’s four days of interrogation, his savoir-faire disintegrating even as he steadfastly denies that he is a traitor. Philby’s treason is an often-told story, but Elliott is an unknown figure. The unfolding of their negotiations and the nature of the friendship underpinning them is not seat-of-your-pants televisual excitement, but it is the stuff of sustained intrigue – enough to keep us watching for six episodes, certainly.
What also might keep us on the couch is the sense of a society changing, not so much at its heart as around its edges. Cary structures his plot as a series of oppositions: between Elliott and Philby, of course, but also between the upper-crust SIS – which would become MI6 – and the investigators of MI5 who often had crossed over from the police forces, between men and the women they find largely unfathomable, between the British and Americans, between the West and Russia.
Sometimes, what is curious is how similar the two sides of each coin can be. Parallel interrogation sessions in London and Moscow mirror each other; since nobody trusts anybody, they ask the same questions. Elliott is interrogated by a woman from MI5 with a northern accent and, unknown to him, a West Indian husband at home who frets – just as Philby’s wife did – that he doesn’t know much about her. There is a sense that what Elliott finds most disturbing about being questioned at all is that the questioner is not of his class. Or gender, obviously. That’s not how things were supposed to be done. They were supposed to be kept between friends. There are hints that this is exactly what he will try to do.
