Senteur As somebody who had not heard any of this before, it became a curious phenomenon to sit and watch a film and slowly have the realities begin to click into place.

Nicole I enjoyed watching this film and would recommend other to give it a try , (as I am) but this movie, although enjoyable to watch due to the better than average acting fails to add anything new to its storyline that is all too familiar to these types of movies.

Hattie I didn’t really have many expectations going into the movie (good or bad), but I actually really enjoyed it. I really liked the characters and the banter between them.

Philippa All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.

dgtarun The Japanese Wife is just another piece of diamond. Rahul Bose and Chigusa Takaku have done a wonderful job. Although, Japan is my favorite country and Japanese are the most preferred people for me as I have a big respect for them. This movie just made me to cry which I really could n't stop. Trust me, this is just a movie based on Platonic love and it specifies what is a true love is. The Japanese Wife just made my day and now I wish I could also marry a Japanese girl. Loved this movie to the core. I would recommend this movie to all the audience. Really a sweet and a brilliant movie. I just that a sequel to The Japanese Wife comes very soon. I really can't wait to watch it. Aparna Sen just did a great job and wish she comes out with a sequel to it very soon.

vishnu_kumar7 The Japanese wife will left you with mixed feeling when you will come out of the theater...Rahul Bose delivered one of his best performance in this movie..The storyline of the movie is simple,lucid and soothing to the viewers...Cinematography in Sundanbans must had been a tough job but very well delivered...The most amazing part of the cinematography was the capturing of floods in the second half of the movie...The kite fight added some light moments in the movie.. though in the end,movie left me with gloomy feeling where all the characters sacrificed almost everything...the message of the movie is difficult to pen down in words but whatever it is..its delivered with perfection... simply awesome movie to watch...

svaidyaji It is another pseudo artistic movie. I watched hoping being an Aparna Sen movie it should be good, but was disappointed.It lacks story, acting as well as punchline. Reema is totally wasted. There is no depth nor details. Instead of Japanese it could have easily been Mumbai wife. How they became pen-friends remains a mystery. There is old style thunderstorm and rain to emphasize something bad is going to happen. Despite being relatively short movie, it is tiring and unrealistic. There is a young guy and a young widow living under one roof with no hot outcome ... totally unrealistic in today's world.Overall, it is an avoidable movie. Be ready to be disappointed.

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".