L'épouse de la nuit

"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.

I didn't expect a crime movie to be the most Ozu film in his early career, but this story of, essentially, three people in a room ends up the quiet, introspective look at choices, change, and the inevitability of people adapting to new things is as much in line with Tokyo Story or Late Autumn as anything else so far. On the other hand, it's also his most visually striking work, with Ozu wearing German Expressionistic and Hitchcockian influences on his sleeve, especially in the opening ten minutes or so.

We start with a daring robbery. A masked man holds up a bank at the beginning of the night, getting away with a handful of cash as the area gets surrounded by cops. This man is Shuji (Tokihiko Okada), and this gets contrasted with a mother, Mayumi (Emiko Yagumo) taking care of her sick daughter, Michiko (Mitsuko Ichimura), with the doctor (Tatsuo Saito) telling the mother that the little girl should be fine, if she survives the night. Until the morning, it's touch and go. How will these stories interconnect? Well, Shuji gets a ride home in a taxi driven by an undercover policeman (Chishu Ryu), and that home is to Michiko, the robbery done as an act of desperation for funds to help treat the little girl.

Now, I had this thought as the stories came together. Well, first I thought the title of the film was indicating that Mayumi would be forced to pretend to be Shuji's wife, but nope, they're just married. However, I was thinking that this earnest bit of crime was something the movie would quickly forgive as necessary in the face of hard financial times. And yet...it never does it. It's empathetic towards the action, but never to the point of deciding to let him off. He's going to be punished for his crime, even if no one was hurt and the money gets returned. He still needs punishment, and everyone acknowledges it.

And that subtext is what gives the film its power and interest. The story is very spare. It's only 65-minutes long, and I think most other directors would get, maybe, forty minutes out of this (Bresson could probably get 75). Not a whole lot actually happens, most of the film being set in the apartment (covered in movie posters, Ozu was obviously a huge movie nerd). The only plotworthy things of note are the passing back and forth of a pair of guns (one owned by Shuji, the other by the policeman) that force the Policeman to sit still for a long stretch of time and see the earnestness of Shuji taking care of little Michiko while Mayumi holds the policeman in place with the implied threat of violence.

That stretch allows the policeman his space for empathy, and the film becomes a series of long, meaningful looks. It's about subtext and subtlety as everyone knows exactly where the story will end, and yet no one is eager to see it happen. Shuji doesn't want to go to jail. Mayumi doesn't want to lose her husband. Michiko doesn't understand much, but we often see her reaching out for her daddy when she's not asleep. And the policeman just understand the situation. It's a slow, steady march towards a predetermined spot, determined the moment Shuji drew that gun on the bank tellers.

Sure, the opening still has some open questions (why not just arrets Shuji when he gets in the car?), but much like Ozu's other early work, those early moments that lack clarity give way to clear-eyed handling of a quieter, human dimension. And that's where Ozu finds his staying power as a filmmaker: settling into small moves with grand implications but told in intimate, quiet ways.

That being said, the opening questions and the startling lack of story stretched very thin hold me back slightly on the film. I mean, the ending is essentially ten minutes of looking back and forth from the door to the apartment, down the stairs, and out to the street. I feel something as it plays out, but it's stretching out a moment very, very thin.

Still, I think it's a worthwhile and very short discovery from Ozu's silent period. It presages where he'll go and define his work through the forties and fifties, but doing it in a completely different genre. It's good, interesting, surprisingly moving, and...too long. But that's a relatively minor sin.

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.

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.