What happens when you have no job? You spend all day having an affair with strangers through dating websites!…
Director Daisuke Miura crafts a world of secretly messy affairs in The City of Betrayal. Infidelity is ripe in the world of joblessness, as the unemployed slacker Yuichi (Sosuke Ikematsu) spends his days finding women on online dating websites through his girlfriend Satomi’s (Eriko Nakamura) laptop. Meanwhile Tomoko is a 40yr old housewife (Shinobu Terajima) who feels mildly towards her marriage with husband Koji (Mitsuru Hirata).
Whilst their successful spouses are at work, the bored couple jump to meeting in the daytime, enjoying a full on relationship that’s slow to start but quickly ramps up to sordid steamy gatherings in Tokyo sex hotels. Age doesn’t matter, as the couple grow closer whilst meeting illicitly behind their partners’ backs, and whilst neither are unhappy in their relationships some underlying issues are still tense under the surface. Yuichi is unhappy with his pride being hurt, from girlfriend Satomi being the worker in the household and constantly floating him cash, as he can’t get his act together and become a decent human being. Whilst Tomoko is bored in her marriage and is looking for something malicious to spite her sometimes-neglectful husband, who is always off drinking with a co-worker in the evenings (he crops up sporadically through the film, and we’re hinted at is in a gay affair with husband Koji).
The camerawork is subtle throughout The City of Betrayal, indeed its pretty static most of the time and the screenplay instead is the main piece on centre stage. The characters are meaningful in their performances, and occasionally it feels as if they truly are real human beings that are not only aware they’re secretly hurting other people, but also causing upset towards themselves whilst love remains too powerful for them to part. The music is quiet, almost non existent in the background, and yet its subtly gentle enough to lull the audience into becoming a sordid part of the tempestuous affair being acted out on screen. The actors themselves get a lot of room to breathe in their performances, with extended camera shots following every movement and pause in dialogue, floating around tight sets to give us an intricate glimpse into these broken lives. It feels like sometimes the camera was left on accidently and the characters continued to act, going off-script and instead deviating into becoming the torrid couple with their secret fling.
At the heart of the film, The City of Betrayal is a story of love and humanity, exploring the morals of affairs as much as it does about the humanity of self. Yuichi has the most to explore in his personality about not wanting to change, whilst constantly bemoaning the world around him. Yet explosive arguments between him and girlfriend Satomi cause some genuine anguish in the audience, as you know Yuichi is in the wrong with some accusations and yet he won’t back down from fear of being caught. If I’m honest, The City of Betrayal could probably have been at least 30 minutes shorter, and you know a film is going to be a little bit shit when the director apologises on stage beforehand for it being full of “lengthy traditional Japanese pauses, interspersed with fleeting moments of action”. To me, that just smacks of laziness, and a drab script that repeats the same scenes in different locations for two hours began to drag very quickly. At one point I even fell asleep for half an hour, woke up, and the plot had progressed nowhere. There’s definitely something wrong when you can miss ¼ of a film on the first viewing and yet you’ve missed absolutely nothing. If you’re a fan of slow lingering Japanese dramas with passion and moments of dullness, then The City of Betrayal is the one for you. Otherwise make like me and fall asleep during the performance, or avoid it completely, this is a film you can quite easily skip.