What Did the Lady Forget?

Michiko Kuwano

Yasujirō Ozu's What Did the Lady Forget?, from 1937, is a slight and short, yet engrossing domestic comedy. Komiya is a mild-mannered medical professor who is hen-pecked by his wife, Tokiko. Their domestic routine is upended by the appearance of their niece, Setsuko (Michiko Kuwano), who is visiting from Osaka. Setsuko's behavior and appearance, she wears Western style clothes while smoking and drinking openly, is an affront to the more traditional femininity displayed by the housewives in Tokiko's bourgeoise circle. They live a life of circumscribed routine that Setsuko finds stifling. She gets Komiya to loosen up a bit, he agrees to take her to a geisha house, and assert himself more in his relationship with his wife. Tokiko, for her part, responds positively to her more self-assured husband and domestic tranquility and equilibrium are regained.  

If that summary was all there was to What Did the Lady Forget?, then it wouldn't be all that different from most other domestic comedies of the 1930s, be they made in Japan or Hollywood. However, the exactitude of Ozu's camera placement and mise-en-scene is breathtaking. Scattered amongst the bric a brac on the screen, we see and hear repeated signs of Western influence upon Japan: baseball, Marlene Dietrich, Johnny Walker, Vat 69, Frederic March, William Powell, etc. Ozu also perks up this fairly staid  and set bound affair with little doodles of life as it is lived: lingering over a boy throwing a ball at a wall or Komiya playfully balancing a newspaper. 

What really sets this film apart is Ozu's inventive use of the of the fields of view within the frame. Almost every shot utilizes the foreground, middle ground, and background. The virtuosity displayed is not an end in itself, but is used to comment on the action. When Setsuko stumbles through the house after a drunken revel, from background to foreground in a fixed shot, she is literally and figuratively upsetting the domestic order. A later shot from the same angle, of the lights going off in the house, celebrates the repair of that domestic order. When his characters go out of doors, Ozu's tracking shots express the exhilaration of people moving freely.

Some of the acting is constrained by conventional nature of the story. Komiya's meekness and Tokiko's dourness are overly typed. That makes Michiko's transgressive performance as Setsuko seem all the more like a breath of fresh air. It is obvious that Ozu was entranced by this refreshing new type of woman, though the scenario suggests she might just have to knuckle under when she accepts the proposal of her suitor. The ruptures that modernity would cause to traditional Japanese society would be further explored by Ozu in his post-war work, but What Did the Lady Forget? is a harbinger of things to come. Sadly, Ms. Kuwano's contributions to Japanese cinema would be cut short. She would die from the complications of an ectopic pregnancy in 1946. She was only 31.