What Did the Lady Forget? / Nani wa shokujo wa wasureta (1937)

The modern girl lectures her uncle

Of all of Ozu’s available pre-war movies, What Did the Lady Forget?* seems the most foreign. Not because it is so “Japanese,” but because it seems to belong to no plausible world at all.

Komiyo is a college professor who appears to be hen-pecked by his wife Tokio. So far, so comedy. But the way she shows her bossiness is that she makes him go play golf on the weekend — out of town and overnight. Where have we ever seen that?

On that set-up, the bossy wife should put her foot down and tell him he should stay home and we should see the comic lengths he goes to in order to escape. But here, she sends him off. And he doesn’t even like golf. On the weekend things come to a head, he sneaks off to a bar and then stays overnight with one of his students (male, so no hanky panky is going on there). And his wife doesn’t have an adventure on the side either. So what’s going on?

Simultaneously, they are visited by their ultra-modern niece Setsuko from Osaka. She is so liberated that she sneaks out on the same weekend and is found drinking and smoking in the same bar used by the professor.

The modern girl drinks and smokes alone in public

She then forces him to take her to a geisha house, just so she can see some geishas perform (and this is the performing geisha, not a brothel), after which she goes home, where her aunt finds her drunk and lectures her and she lets the uncle’s secret out of the bag. Tokio lectures the prof when he finally returns home, and he loses his temper and slaps her. Deep apologies all round, but somehow niece is now engaged to the student, whom she supposedly only met that morning. At that point, Setsuko corners her uncle and lectures him about being too untraditional and unmanly and takes off again for Osaka.

It’s all rather like Ozu was making a Charlie Chase comedy and he and the screenwriter got the pages mixed up.

All of this is shown with that gentle shomin-geki tone, chuckles rather than laughs

Then, after Setsuko is gone, we return to the realm of western comedy. Rather than being upset by the slap, Tokio finds that she rather liked it, and her friends say she’s lucky to have a husband who would care enough to do something like that.  (I know, in the 21st century, we have mixed feelings about such a turnaround, but it is a very common and traditional twist for family comedy since pretty much forever.)

Then Ozu puts together one of the most unusual and charming sequences in any of his films.

Tokio gives the servants the night off, then gently touches his shoulder in passing, kneels beside him, takes his cigarette for a puff, steals his paper, and offers to personally make him a cup of coffee. He says no, coffee keeps him awake, but she replies, don’t worry, you’ll be plenty sleepy tonight, and smiles. It takes him awhile to understand her real meaning, then the film ends with him pacing eagerly in the halls till she brings a tray.**

A sequence of stills can only hint at the charm of the scene. It is such an unexpected, light, playful, unforced, unexaggerated, and genuine sequence that all of the previous confusions of the movie evaporate.

* I have no idea what the title has to do with the rest of the movie, who the lady might be, and what she might have forgotten.

** Ozu will later do a similar scene with the middle-aged couple at the end of Green Tea Over Rice, but without any of the sexual suggestions.