What Did the Lady Forget?

Yasujirō Ozu's 1937 Japanese film follows a professor in Tokyo and his domineering wife hosting their niece from Osaka. Setsuko is young, lively and indifferent to rules; she smokes, takes her uncle to a geisha house and overturns the order of the household. The film is one of Ozu's pre-war comedies and is livelier than the calm tone of his later period. The matter at its centre is the balance of power inside a marriage and how an outsider makes it visible. The camera has not yet settled fully into its low fixed position. The ending arrives at a resolution about the wife's position that is troubling seen from now. Who it's for: viewers interested in Ozu's early period and pre-war Japanese cinema. Who it's not for: anyone expecting his acknowledged mature work, or troubled by the gender conventions of the period.