What Did the Lady Forget? (1937)
Directed by Yasujiro Ozu
Ozu began making films towards the end of the silent era and stubbornly kept his films silent until 1936’s great, emotionally unsparing drama The Only Son. He embraced the new technologies more fully the following year on his second sound feature, a comedy of manners. Lady’s plot concerns the arrival of licentious Osaka teen Setsuko (played by Michiko Kuwano) to the Tokyo home of her stern aunt Tokiko (Sumiko Kurishima) and meek uncle Komiya (Tatsuo Saito), a university professor of medicine. Tokiko bullies her husband off to play a round of weekend golf away from her, and Komiya ultimately ends up enlisting his niece’s help to conceal the fact that he went to a bar and geisha performance instead. Setsuko pushes the older couple towards a confrontation that leads her to consider her own future. Ozu’s silent films had often studied peoples’ comportments to show their discomfort with their material circumstances. To his sound works he added the qualities of the human voice, and in films such as Lady, drew humor and sympathy from peoples’ efforts to will new lives into being through the ephemeral sounds of spoken words. Aaron Cutler (July 10-12, 11am at IFC Center’s Ozu matinee series)