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What Did the Lady Forget? (Yasujiro Ozu, 1937)
🕑 Added 2021-02-19 07:33:40 +0000 UTC
An Ozu comedy, although neither as broad or as melancholy as I Was Born, But... This strikes me as a very strange film, although I suspect it falls in line with dominant ideas of the time regarding marriage and gender. Part of the conflict seems to center around the fact that Komiya (Tatsuo Saitō), a mild-mannered medical professor, is mostly content letting his uptight wife Tokiko (Sumiko Kurishima) rule the roost. Even if she annoys him at times with her prim moralizing and pushy demeanor, he, like many married men, realizes it's easier to let her have her way and avoid overt conflict. After all, Tokiko's management of domestic affairs lets Komiya conduct his research in relative peace.
The instigator in this scenario is the couple's niece Setsuko (Michiko Kuwano), who comes in like a wrecking ball. And like Ms. Cyrus, Setsuko is an avid drinker and smoker, wants to party like a dude, and at times (like at the geisha bar) reads as almost gender-queer. She's not, of course, although her eventual courtship with Komiya's grad student Okada (Shûji Sano) suggests that she will replicate the exact relationship pattern (women on top, until further notice) that she found so distasteful in her uncle and aunt.
The disorienting conclusion of What Did the Lady Forget?, which finds Komiya reasserting his dominance by slapping Tokiko, is difficult to read. The woman takes it in stride, but both her husband and her niece come to her in private to apologize. What's Ozu suggesting here? It's as though the gender dynamic between Komiya and Tokiko has to be ironized with the threat of violence. That is, Komiya is willing to submit to Tokiko, so long as they both recognize that he can rise up against her at any moment.
One review described the film as having reasserted patriarchy, in no uncertain terms. But the terms look pretty uncertain to me. Within a traditionalist society, is it possible to alter gender roles to suit your needs, so long as everyone knows that everything could revert to factory settings if deemed necessary? This seems to explain the parallelism between the two couples (two versions of "academic nebbish plus willful, grumpy woman"). But then, the Setsuko / Okada meet-cute is so eleventh-hour, and so unconvincing, as to imply that Ozu's heart wasn't in it. I'm not going to pretend to have any answers here.
