Rude to Love
愛に乱暴
Storyline
The whole story, ending included.
A childless wife who keeps a careful, handmade life learns of her husband's affair — and takes a chainsaw to the floor of their home.
Momoko Hase has been married to Mamoru for eight years. They live in an annexe beside his family home, where his widowed mother, Teruko, lives. Momoko keeps a careful, handmade life: elaborate meals, soap-making classes she teaches twice a week, fine china, a renovation her husband will not discuss. Every morning she tidies the neighbourhood rubbish point. Mamoru barely looks at her. Someone is setting fires around the district, and the stray cat she calls Pi-chan has vanished; at night she thinks she hears its bell under the floor.
In the evenings she reads the posts of a young woman seeing a married man and hoping for his child. Then Mamoru takes her to a hotel lounge to meet his lover, Nao Miyake. Nao is pregnant; Mamoru wants a divorce. Momoko, who began by ordering them to stop, falls apart. Mamoru moves in with Nao, and the soap classes are to be closed.
She buys a chainsaw and cuts open the floor of the annexe. When Teruko comes to investigate the noise, Momoko hides beneath the boards and hears Mamoru and his mother talking, and the past she has kept hidden comes out. Momoko was once Mamoru's lover too, and when she became pregnant he left his first wife. She lost the baby before the wedding and never said so; Teruko has always believed she lied. The posts Momoko has been reading are her own, from eight years before.
Digging beneath, she finds a tin of baby clothes. Covered in mud, she tells Teruko and Mamoru she is not a liar. When Mamoru says she has gone mad, she answers that she is only pretending, because otherwise she really would. He tells her nothing is any fun with her. She bags up her magazines, china and phone to throw away, finds the rubbish point on fire, and runs barefoot from a policeman. At the home centre, Li, a Chinese student who works there, gives her his sandals and thanks her for always keeping the rubbish point clean. Teruko tells her she is moving out and that Momoko may do as she likes with the place. In the last scene Momoko sits on the veranda eating an ice lolly, watching the annexe she shared with Mamoru being torn down.
Starring
Noriko Eguchias Momoko Hase
A housewife in the annexe of her husband's family home, holding together a careful, handmade life while her marriage empties out.
Momoko Hase’s story
Momoko fills her days with care: soap-making classes, a renovation Mamoru will not discuss, a rubbish point she tidies every morning. At night she reads a young woman's posts about a married lover and a longed-for child: her own, from eight years before. When Mamoru introduces his pregnant lover and asks for a divorce, she falls apart, then takes a chainsaw to the annexe floor. Hiding beneath it, she hears Mamoru and his mother talk: Momoko was the lover whose pregnancy ended his first marriage, and Teruko believes she lied. She lost that baby and told no one. She digs up a tin of baby clothes and says she is not a liar. When Li thanks her for keeping the rubbish point clean, she weeps. She ends on the veranda with an ice lolly, watching the annexe come down.
Kotaro Koizumias Mamoru Hase
Momoko's husband, indifferent at home, who has made a younger lover pregnant and wants a divorce.
Mamoru Hase’s story
Mamoru comes home and goes straight to the bath, answering his wife a phrase at a time: the renovation can wait, the cups are nice, the fires are frightening. In a hotel lounge he tells Momoko that Nao is carrying his child and that he wants a divorce, and he stops coming home. Momoko, following him, sees him watch a parent and small child with a gentle face, then let himself into Nao's flat. Calling at the annexe, he tells his mother that Nao is five months pregnant. Eight years before, it was Momoko who was his lover, and Momoko's pregnancy that made him leave his first wife. Faced with her covered in mud, he tells her she has gone mad and that nothing with her is any fun, asks again for the divorce, and leaves with his mother.
Fumika Babaas Nao Miyake
Mamoru's lover, a teacher, pregnant with his child and ready to raise it alone if she must.
Jun Fubukias Teruko Hase
Mamoru's widowed mother in the main house, civil to Momoko and privately convinced she once lied to the family.
Long Mizumaas Li
A Chinese student working at the local home centre, the one person who thanks Momoko for what she does.
Why it matters
Rude to Love is about what a marriage leaves a woman holding when it ends: a house that belongs to her husband's family, a skill that does not pay the rent, an age at which starting again is easier to say than to do. Momoko's careful domesticity is her claim to a place, and the film shows how little of it anyone sees; the one person who thanks her is a stranger at the home centre. It will not let her be simply the wronged wife. She once took Mamoru from another woman, and when the posts she has been reading turn out to be her own, the story becomes one about the same injury passing from woman to woman while the man moves on. It leaves open whether tearing the annexe down is an ending, or the first free act of her married life.