Ozu Story

G reat news that IFC Center has recently launched its extended, every-weekend, in-chronological-order retrospective of football jersey
films by Yasujiro Ozu, which runs through November 7th. I’ve gone on lately about several of his films (including his last, “An Autumn Afternoon,” which will conclude the series) and was sorry not to have a few extra lines in the section this week to extol the merits and highlight the peculiarities of Ozu’s second sound film, “What Did the Lady Forget?,” from 1937. (I’m sorry to have missed its first screening, today; it will play again Saturday and Sunday, at 11 A.M.) It opens with a shot that is both graphically alluring and socially declamatory—a closeup of a glossy fender and tail-light of an imposing, American-style car in motion. The shot sets up the film’s first dramatic contrast—that of its passenger, a stylish young woman, Setsuko, and her Euro-American clothing, with her aunt and her traditional Japanese garb—and since her uncle, a doctor and med-school professor, is soon shown to wear Western-style suits, the plot’s lines of soccer jerseys
conflict are established from the start.
Ozu’s compositions are impulsive and energetic, matching the surprising vigor of the free-spirited, audacious, even brazen young woman who defies the codes of proper behavior and (spoiler alerts for what follows) gives hardly a hoot for whose name she tarnishes along the way. Her aunt, by contrast, a domestic tyrant, dominates her easygoing (yet deceptive) husband with her imperious propriety. Yet, for all the trouble that ensues, Setsuko turns out to be a sort of welcome spice in the household, and the film’s dénoument—in which husband slaps wife—comes off as the sort of offhanded cruelty that Ozu so often depicted as standard practice in Japan yet which, here, he presents as a sign of manhood, one which his wife even boasts about to her friends! And which they envy her for! The concluding scene of tender conjugal eroticism leaves no doubt as to what Ozu thought women want; yet I wonder whether the story doesn’t have significant documentary value, for what it suggests of nba jerseys
Japanese mores of the time. I wish I knew how the movie was received there then.