DRAGNET GIRL (Yasujiro Ozu, 1933)

From a row of hats on hooks on an office wall, one pops off as though a poltergeist were at play; this fedora is light, whereas the others are dark. Recalling Pudovkin’s The End of St. Petersburg (1927), an overhead shot of workers from this office depart for the day, their stark shadows competing with waning sunlight: sparse humanity competing with the temporarily ended office bustle, and reminding us of the odd-hat-out and the single vacated typewriter. The boss’s son gives Tokiko (a young Kinuyo Tanaka), the “missing” typist, a ruby; why does she accept this? Tokiko’s personality is split, between the seeming “good girl” typist by day and the slinky, vampish small-time gangster’s moll by night. Jyoji (Joji Oka, marvelous), this former boxer and, it will turn out, soft-hearted criminal, will help out an innocent, who could be a projection of what Tokiko used to be; Kazuko wants Jyoji to discourage her brother’s interest in being part of Jyoji’s gang. Kazuko’s brother, beneath his tough-punk façade also an innocent, could be a projection of what Jyoji used to be. Nostalgic, Jyoji haunts the local boxing club; divided, he stops (and stoops) to re-tie an errant shoelace even while fleeing the police. Jealous of Kazuko, Tokiko, herself, remains divided; while fleeing from the police along with her Jyoji, she shoots him in the foot and pleads for him to give himself up! We won’t get much prison-time for theft, she argues; “We’re still young!” Does she really have so little inkling of how old Jyoji feels?

Yasujiro Ozu’s silent Hijosen no onna fuses expressionism and histrionic redemption; those who miss the black comedy may deem the film overly sentimental. Even those who “get it” may be disappointed—at least (pardon) divided about Ozu’s achievement here.

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OHAYÔ (Yasujiro Ozu, 1959)

Although Yasujiro Ozu’s Good Morning certainly, if obliquely, refers to it, Good Morning isn’t a remake of Ozu’s silent I Was Born, But . . . (1932) in the way that his Floating Weeds (1959) is a remake of his silent Story of Floating Weeds (1934). In the Ozu œuvre it isn’t much of anything really; it is affable and visually pure, but the comedy never comes together in a meaningful way. Its assortment of characters, across generations, in a modern Japanese suburb never yields the requisite undertow of melancholy attaching itself to the older people, the two men facing retirement and the woman facing the reality of her growing senility. The stubborn desire of two young brothers to have their parents buy them a television set: this should resonate in the context of what the three elder characters are facing; but it doesn’t. One can say this, however: the final, familiar Ozuvian image, of wash flapping dry on an outdoors line, resolves sweetly and with humor a joke running through the film: a boy’s habitual soiling of his underpants and pants. One loves the film, I guess, because it’s by Ozu; but Good Morning is very minor Ozu, and almost entirely superficial. It happily suggests that some problems can be solved, but one notices that neither the boy’s sensitivity and sense of shame over the matter nor the possibility of an underlying medical or psychological cause are ever addressed. Given its method of zigzagging amongst different households, the film lights more often than it lands—and indeed lightness is one of its principal virtues. But one expects more from Ozu.
     The rumors and gossip pertaining to the money “missing” from a woman’s club intriguingly brings this film, however, closer to Hitchcock than I ever expected to find Ozu.

FLOATING WEEDS (Yasujiro Ozu, 1959)

Inferior to his 1934 version, which is shorter, silent and in black and white, Yasujiro Ozu’s Ukigusa is nevertheless a spirited, lovely film. I am doomed for the rest of my life to see it rarely because my normal preference will always be to revisit the original. However, Ozu’s greatest decade, the 1950s, included the greatest film ever made, Early Summer (1951), and another of the twenty-five greatest films, Tokyo Story (1953); but sound and color add nothing of great value to Ozu’s remake of Ukigusa monogatari. I see only commercial motivation behind all this. I will say nothing here about its story, which essentially remains unchanged.
     Seaside; the first shot, inaugurating a brief Ozuvian cluster of establishing shots, is formal and imposing: upon a strip of land in the foreground stands a black bottle, beyond which, with the sea in between, is a strip of land, three-quarters of the way across right to left, upon which stands a white lighthouse. Thus the two upright things are parallel, as are, in a more oblique way, the deep blue sea and the light blue sky, which occupies four-fifths of the frame. The image, which is correlative to the traveling theatrical troupe/family drama about to unfold, is therefore one of balance—but of imperfect balance. (A later shot, with a shift in distance and perspective, parallels the lighthouse with an electric pole.) A young man, after all, does not know that his “uncle,” who is part of the visiting troupe, is really his biological father. This is the big difference between the two versions; with its assault on patriarchy, the outcome of World War II for Japan has left the issue of paternity in the later film, for the boy, of smaller consequence. Life goes on—ironically.

THE LADY AND THE BEARD (Yasujiro Ozu, 1931)

“All great men have beards!” Kiichi Okajima declares, citing Charles Darwin and Karl Marx; but bearded, traditionally garbed Kiichi was born in the twentieth century, while Darwin and Marx lived and died in the preceding century—and elsewhere than in Japan. Yasujiro Ozu’s comedy Shukujo to hige charts the gradual entrance of this old-fashioned young man into his own time. One hopes that Ozu doesn’t approve of Kiichi’s chauvinism, and he certainly mocks certain aspects of traditionalism; but one must concede the possibility that Ozu also identifies with his flamboyant protagonist. After all, it is 1931 and Ozu, in his twenties, is still making silent pictures!
     Ironically, Kiichi enters modernity with a traditional act of chivalry: He rescues Hiroko, an office typist, who is preyed upon by Furyou, a female gangster whose modernity mirror-images Hiroko’s in an exaggerated, even grotesque form. Both Hiroko and Furyou fall for Kiichi, especially once Hiroko has convinced him to shave his beard and put on modern clothes in pursuit of a modern job. (A society woman joins the other two in pursuing Kiichi romantically.) Naturally, Kiichi is most attracted to Hiroko, whose modernity, tempered by traditionalism, is modest. Even shorn of his beard, Kiichi cuts a striking figure that Hiroko’s modesty beautifully complements. Implicit in this is Hiroko’s attraction to the very image of Kiichi that she has encouraged him to change! Hiroko desires the substance of the former Kiichi dressed in the appearance of the current Kiichi—a comical expression of Japan’s dilemma in negotiating the competing claims upon it, especially as the lure of modernity becomes code for rejecting Japanese tradition, to whatever extent, in favor of Western influence.
     Discontinuous, sometimes visually clumsy, and not all that funny, this is nevertheless a fascinating comedy.

DAYS OF YOUTH (Yasujiro Ozu, 1929)

One of his earliest films, and the earliest one currently available, Yasujiro Ozu’s Gakusei romance: Wakaki hi is a silent slapstick comedy. Its joint protagonists are Watanabe and Yamamoto, college students who come to share a Tokyo apartment and who pursue the same flirtatious girl, Chieko. The film opens with a series of leftward pans of the urban environment, including a school football field in use; it ends with the same shots, but now rightward and in reverse order—a book-closing gesture that in effect leaves both boys with one another as neither “gets the girl.”
     Indeed, their romantic rivalry apparently aims at drawing themselves closer together rather than apart, which would likely be the upshot if one had actually coupled with Chieko. On the wall is a poster of the Hollywood film Seventh Heaven (Frank Borzage, 1927) picturing the film’s romantic stars, Janet Gaynor and Charles Farrell. One wonders if Ozu knew that both these stars were gay.
     Ozu was in his mid-twenties when he made this film, nearly as young as his protagonists, and it is uncharacteristically full of sexual imagery. The one token heterosexual gesture consists of one of the boys dusting off snow from the seat of Chieko’s pants seat when all three are at a Taguchi ski resort following final exams; all other gestures and images are homoerotic. These include shots of the boys’ bare feet, considerable touching between them, one gorgeous shot from behind the boys as side-by-side they face a vast snowy landscape, one boy lying in the snow, stuck at the other’s mischievous hand, his skis perpendicular to the ground, which is to say, erect. One boy hilariously pursues a ski that the other has sent sailing down a slight decline. Poles of all kinds, smokestacks, a smoking chimney, both boys puffing on pipes: combinately, all this becomes a visual translation of Herman Melville’s phallic punning in the story “I and My Chimney.”
     There is a bit of business that Ozu would repeat in the following year’s That Night’s Wife: a closeup of hands tying a shoelace with a double knot. It is a gesture in pursuit of control, an attempt to put a tight lid on things, an expression of anxiety.
     In my twenty previous entries about Ozu films I have never addressed Ozu’s rumored sexual preference because it had never seemed relevant to the meaning or the character of the films. Here it does seem relevant.
     Oh, by the way, on the train back to Tokyo the boys run into one of their professors, who reveals their final exam grades. Both flunked—which in effect means they hadn’t earned their post-exams vacation and weren’t entitled to pursue Chieko. A very funny comedy, this—and a disquieting one.