'2 Women': Shinobu Terajima shines as celebrated novelist

Japanese biopics of the famous are usually hagiographies, treating their subjects with outsized reverence. This is not the case, however, with Ryuichi Hiroki’s “2 Women,” which fictionalizes the real-life affair of two flawed yet fascinating writers: Jakucho Setouchi (nee Harumi Mitani) and Mitsuharu Inoue.

Setouchi, who died last year at age 99, was a celebrated novelist, activist and, in the second half of her long life, a Buddhist nun. Inoue, who passed in 1992, was the subject of Kazuo Hara’s 1994 documentary, “A Dedicated Life,” which revealed him as a liar and philanderer but also an oddly charismatic figure.

“2 Women,” however, is based on a novel by Inoue’s eldest daughter, Areno, in which Setouchi becomes Miharu Osanai (Shinobu Terajima) and Inoue becomes Atsuro Shiraki (Etsushi Toyokawa). The film faithfully reflects the personalities of its models, though, with Setouchi/Miharu being by design the more relatable of the pair.

Working from a script by long-time collaborator Haruhiko Arai, Hiroki focuses less on public personas and more on intimate relationships that may be hard to rationally or morally justify, but are strongly felt and messily human. As usual with the director, who has examined those reasons in all their erotic and romantic permutations in previous films, the film’s perspective is knowing and sympathetic, while keeping a discreet distance.

Also, he is reuniting with the always excellent, if not always well-used, Terajima, with whom he made two of his best films: “Vibrator” (2003) and “It’s Only Talk” (2005). “2 Women” is another career high point, though it is quite different in tone and content from his previous collaborations with the actor.

We first meet Miharu in 1966 as an already successful writer whose relationship with her moody younger lover (Kengo Kora), for whom she left her husband and small child, is foundering. When she meets the arrogant and attractive Atsuro at a writers’ event, she is receptive to his advances with no delusions about his less-than-noble intentions.

Meanwhile, Atsuro’s long-suffering wife, Shoko (Ryoko Hirosue), visits her husband’s former mistress in the hospital after an attempted suicide. When the mistress confesses that she has had two abortions in her affair with Atsuro, Shoko apologizes, with a pained look that, in the course of the film, will become all too familiar.

The story traces, from start to finish, Miharu’s own affair with this fellow rebel against convention, who may be monstrous in his selfishness but is as true to his own wayward star as she is to hers, as well as erotically passionate and intellectually (though not personally) honest. Although Miharu dumps her younger lover to be with Atsuro, she never seeks to wreck his marriage, just as he never interferes with her career.

That is, theirs is a relationship of mature equals, with passions at a low boil, until things begin to fray as Atsuro reverts to his unfaithful ways, leaving Miharu angry and hurt. These emotions lay the seeds of her decision, considered extreme even in the now-distant 1970s, to take the nun’s vows of celibacy.

In fact, all three of the principal characters may be hard to understand by today’s standards. The film is sort of a trapped-in-amber period piece, depicting a literary bohemia that now no longer exists. And yet in Terajima’s luminous performance, we see a woman vividly present, alive and wiser about her own needs than her sinner of a lover could ever understand, to his everlasting regret.