Open Marriage: A Couple's Shape
オープン・マリッジ ある夫婦のカタチ
Storyline
The whole story, ending included.
A sexless couple in their fifth year tries open marriage for a magazine feature — a V-cinema 官能ドラマ now on Netflix Japan.
Five years into their marriage, Ayaka, a full-time housewife, and her husband Shingo, who works on a women's magazine at a publisher, no longer sleep together. Shingo keeps turning her down. Love, as he puts it, is for his wife; sex is for other women. Then his magazine plans a feature on open marriage, the arrangement in which a couple agrees that each may take other partners, and his editor-in-chief wants a first-hand report. Shingo talks Ayaka into trying it.
Shingo introduces Ayaka to an older illustrator, an odd, unsettling man who takes her sexual awakening in hand and tells her, after a single day, that she has woken up. Her partners come to include the editor-in-chief himself, and one day Shingo comes home to find the two of them together in his house. Shingo has partners of his own, and the jealousy each of them feels turns into an excitement that sends them back to each other: their sexless years are over.
Still, they decide at last that, living like this, there is no point in being married, and they divorce. Free, they find that the thrill has gone: what they had been reaching for outside the marriage only existed because the marriage was there. They miss each other, go back home, and reaffirm their love as husband and wife.
Starring
Masami Ichikawaas Ayaka
A wife five years into a sexless marriage who agrees to try an open marriage and discovers her own desire.
Manzo Shinraas The illustrator
An older illustrator whom Shingo introduces to Ayaka as a partner, and who leads her into a world of sensuality.
Why it matters
Open Marriage: A Couple's Shape is a low-budget erotic V-cinema film, and several viewers noted that much of it plays like adult video. Its premise is still a real question. It takes a couple whose marriage has gone sexless, and a husband who has split love from sex, and hands them an arrangement that sounds like freedom: each may sleep with others, provided both agree. The issues are sexlessness, jealousy and consent, and the gap between an arrangement both partners choose and one that suits only one of them. The film's answer is conservative, and a little surprising for its genre: the forbidden only thrilled them because the marriage framed it. It starred Masami Ichikawa, an adult-video actress, and several of the viewers who reviewed it came across it through a streaming service's recommendations.