Sono yo no tsuma

"That Night's Wife" (the English title) is actually a poor translation of the Japanese "Sono yo no tsuma". A better one might be "My Wife on That Night". Briefly, the film revolves around a desperate man who commits a crime in order to support his family, and the moral dilemma the policeman who tracks him down finds himself in. The film abounds with cultural inconsistencies like Japanese wearing their shoes in the house, etc. It seems Ozu was trying to do a Japanese film in the style of the German realist films he must have been seeing at the time. There is very little of what one associates with the later style of Ozu. Still, it is taut and entertaining.

A desperate man with a sick daughter decides to commit a robbery in order to help her. He begins to feel remorse though, which makes him question his decision.

Ozu made twenty-six movies in his first five years as a director, including this one. He made silent films after silent films began to go out of style, and he made crime films before he went on to do the things he is better known for.

Here we have a mixture of crime and love, and a bit of necessity. Is it wrong to steal bread if you or a loved one are starving? Some would say yes, some no. This story brings that question to the forefront, though it steps it up a notch when the father has to physically confront his victim.

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.

While the characters themselves are stock figures (the good man pushed to criminal activity, the faithful wife, the dutiful but understanding cop, etc.), the execution of this one-room thriller is superb stuff. It has a noirish vibe that feels nothing like Ozu's more famous postwar work. While not a must-see, it is taut, entertaining, and enough of an anomaly in the career of one of cinema's masters to warrant a single viewing from cinephiles.

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.