That Night's Wife

Ozu makes the best of what appears to be an uncharacteristic potboiler assignment involving a man (Tokihiko Okada) driven to crime to help his wife and ailing daughter, chased down by a cop (Fuyuki Yamamoto who looks like a Japanese Charles Bronson) who suddenly faces a moral dilemma. The characters are clearly played for genre type, but great performances make it special -- especially by Emiko Yagumo as the fiercely protective wife -- and Ozu achieves a feeling of moral resolve and atonement through personal sacrifice similar to what he did in WALK CHEERFULLY.

It's one of Ozu's gangster movies from the early 1930s... only it's really about a father whose daughter is so sick he commits a robbery to pay the bills, then gets easily tracked down at the child's bedside.

A brief survey of online discussion refers to this as one of Ozu's "early, non-typical silents." It's the same attitude I complained about in my review of DRAGNET GIRL as if John Ford got off the train from Maine in 1915 and announced "I'm ready to direct How Green Was My Valley. What do you mean this is Azusa?"

It's slow and contemplative and allows the audience to get inside the characters' heads and is a fine little movie. What it doesn't do is use the same, low perspective and simple shots that Ozu would cultivate after the Second World War.... almost certainly because it would not occur to him for fifteen or twenty years that they would work. It's too bad he didn't talk about it with the geniuses on the Internet. They know everything.

...with this crime drama from Shochiku. A man (Tokihiko Okada) commits a daring armed robbery before escaping into the night. But this isn't your average brazen criminal, but rather a desperate father with a small, terribly ill daughter (Mitsuko Ichimura) and a despondent wife (Emiko Yagumo) at her wit's end. Will motivations even matter, though, when the police come knocking, in the form of detective Kagawa (Togo Yamamoto).

Like all of Ozu's films, the scale is intimate, and the focus is on domestic relationships. However, this adds a criminal element to the equation, and it makes for some interesting character dynamics. There's also more maturity in Ozu's technique, evident during some proto-noir street scenes, using a lot of shadow to create tension. The end result is satisfactory, if a bit too slight, and the continued use of the silent film format was quickly making Japanese cinema seem anachronistic.

Those of us who are both attracted to and repelled by auteur-ism are challenged by this very early work of Ozu. Japanese cinema was still silent in 1930, and here an Ozu in his mid-20s got his start making crime films clearly indebted to those of German expressionism as it manifested itself both in Germany and in the US, in the form of the silent American works of Murnau and Von Sternberg.

None of the cinematic trade-marks of Ozu's sound-films are present here, and this challenges some auteurist notions of Ozu as a mandarin-renegade who resisted all western influence. Indeed, this crime tale has a fair amount of camera movement, an action-driven plot (at least for the first half), and chiaroscuro lighting and compositions much more reminiscent of German expressionism than traditional Japanese paintings, the key influence on the mise-en-scene of the director's "mature work" (from an auteurist perspective).

About a third of the way in to this short feature, it gets really meta-. The walls of the apartment of the couple that is the story's focus is covered in Hollywood movie posters. Ozu, that "home-grown Japanese auteur" started off as just another early cinema nerd- advertising his "influences."

Turning to the narrative, you can view it as either wholly unrelated to, or as a forerunner for Ozu's famous family driven meditations. The characters are united in poverty and crime, as with so much noir, but this ultimately proves all of their humanity, rather than the negation of it, as '40s Hollywood would have it. Having said that, we should remember this was made at the end of the silent era. Griffithian sentimentality may also be an influence on this movie's narrative. This struck me as I had always interpreted those bits of Ozu's mature works viewed by most western audiences as "sad" to instead be an Asian negation of "tragedy" and the western fetishization of death. Perhaps, I acknowledge sadly, such scenes were a disguised adoption of that western fetish.

Whether one attributes it to Ozu's authorship, or to dependence on Hollywood faux-optimism, this is a powerfully humane, if sentimental, work.

I believe a more accurate translation of the title would be My Wife on That Night, and hearing it this way underscores who the film's hero is. On a night when her child is deathly ill, her husband has gone out and committed armed robbery to pay for medicine (a touching but stupid move), and is now on the run from police. One of them cleverly tracks him to his apartment, where a standoff begins, because even when either side has the upper hand, they all wait through the night to see if the child survives.

The opening of the film feels very action oriented and Western, something different for Ozu, but the second half, in the apartment, shifts to themes of family and honor. Despite the American movie posters on the wall, the feeling is certainly Japanese. The husband has already said he will return the money in the morning, something which seemed surprising to me, and then later faces his ultimate responsibility. The detective has been kind, and patiently allowed the melodrama with the child to play out. Lastly, the wife has done her very best to defend her family and keep it together, on a night when the lives of both her child and her husband are in danger. The way she held the two guns was a highlight, and I loved the strength in her character.

The trouble is, when the action shifts to the apartment, the film slows to a real crawl. Pacing was a major problem for a story this simple. Just as the character of the wife started to catch herself nodding off to sleep and trying to stay awake, this viewer struggled. Between the pace, the melodramatic subplot of the child, and the squeaky clean behavior of everyone, I ended up not enjoying this very much.