This is a 1930's drama from Hiroshi Shimizu that feels like one of his other movies with a little Mizoguchi thrown in. It is the story of a single mother who works as a bar hostess to provide for her son. Her goal is to make sure he gets a good education so that he can become "a big man." The trouble begins, as it often does in Japanese movies, when the son finds out what it is that his mother does--or more specifically, when his friends find out and start to ostracize him. The movie starts out fairly light-hearted but then gets darker as both mother and son discover that they are trapped in their social situations no matter what they try to do. There are probably a million Japanese movies with similar plots and some them can be a slog to get through. This one is enjoyable though for a number of reasons, not the least of which is the relationship of the boy and his mother. It is affecting to watch him struggle with both his embarrassment and his love for her. There are a few of the on location outdoor scenes that Shimizu is famous for, but most of the movie was shot in sets. Some of the sets have a sparse look about them that gives the movie a cheap feeling, but others have an almost expressionist look, that when combined with some fog, give them a rather sinister quality that adds to the movie's atmosphere.
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Jun Yokoyama has been playing hooky. When his mother, Michiko Kuwano, finds out, she asks him why. He won't tell her: it's because she's a bar girl at a hotel, and the other children shun him.
Hiroshi Shimizu's movie is split interestingly between the adult world and the child's world. The world of children has its own pecking order, and subtle rules that maintain its structure, punctuated by fights. The adult world also has its rankings, ad the lovely Miss Kuwano is at the bottom of the pile, unable to even quit her ill-paying job. Yet the adult world has absolute control over the world of children, and is quick to seek out signs that something threatens its own order.
As he grew in reputation and autonomy, Shimizu would become more and more interested in the problems of children; here, he resorts to a big finish to elicit a strong audience reaction. Even so, his handling of his juvenile actors is superb. -
1937 was a busy year for Japanese cinema, and films were produced in quick pace, often impacting the quality. Shimizu Hiroshi turned out six films that year, among them "Kaze no naka no kodomo" (Children of the Wind), which was a critical hit and was sent to Venice film festival. "Wind" showed that Shimizu had time to complete and polish the work, but this wasn't the case with most of the films that Shochiku delegated for the director. "Koi no wasurete" (Forget Love for Now, 1937) is a much more conservative maternal melodrama, that does feature children prominently, but doesn't feel like a particularly Shimizu-esque work. The screenplay is by the societal Saito Ryosuke, who later co-wrote Ozu's fallen woman narrative "Kaze no naka no mendori" (A Hen in the Wind, 1948).
Michiko Kuwano plays a single-mother named Oyuki, who has no other alternative, but to work as a bar hostess, in order to support her young son. The film follows the mother's bleak life, as well as the son's difficulty of finding friends, when he has a mother that everybody thinks is a bad influence. It's mom-shaming in a very rough form, and for myself, the fact that I have seen the similar narrative done better both in Japanese films, and foreign ones, lessens the impact of the Shimizu film. It's just one more to the pile, and for a talented director like him, not a particularly memorable effort.
One can see, how this would have been made differently in the post-war. Besides the fact that the gender roles would have improved, it would have most likely been more individualist, instead of the broad strokes used by Shimizu and Saito here. This is not bad, but it is also not a game changer. If you want to feel sad for 73 minutes, give it a watch as a part of a larger Shimizu retrospective.