Shimizu

Hiroshi Shimizu

 Long serving director Hiroshi Shimizu (1903–1966) has become the man of the moment. The Paris Cinémathêque has finally mounted it’s three times postponed retrospective.  All my French chums are writing saying they are unimpressed. I felt left out as the only Shimizu film I’m aware of having seen is the 1936  Arigatô-san / Mr. Thank You with Ken Uehara playing a good natured bus driver doing favors for his passengers and the locals along his route through poor mountain villages - so, I dived into You Tube where I found Shimizu’s Kanzashi / The Ornamental Hairpin from 1941.

This one has more curiosity value than anything else. The opening is OK with a couple of young women, star Kinuyo Tanaka who was married to Shimizu and friend Hiroko Kawasaki, walking along the forest road with the parade of pilgrims paced by the drum beater women whose rhythm is underlined by a passage of the sparse score.

They are staying at the local mountain resort where visitor groups prove to have got the services of the twelve of eighteen blind masseurs management has recruited, leaving the existing long term, reduced price customers out of luck. Grouchy professor Tatsuo Saitô complains. While sharing the hot spring, an unrecognisably young Chishû  Ryû (later regularly with Ozu and Torasan) injures his foot on a coral hair pin that has been lost in the water, seeing a near poetic significance in the event. A letter from Tanaka arrives indicating that she is looking for her missing pin. 

Kawahara, Ryo and Saitô.

Tanaka feels compelled to return and assist in Ryo’s recovery and she and the tree climbing grandsons of old man guest Kanji Kawahara, who Saito is reduced to playing Go with, barrack Ryo’s attempts to go further each day. The plank walk across the river proves too much for him and Tanaka has to piggy back him the last section. Romance between the pair seems likely.

When a noisy pilgrim group arrives - shorter repeat of the early tracking through the interior - the hotel guests, under the grumpy tutelage of the professor, have to double up in their cut price rooms with his snoring worse than old Kawahara’s, about which he has been complaining.

Recovered to the point where he is able to get up the forest stone stairs, Ryo leaves and  Tanaka repeats his climb sheltered by her parasol from the rain (traveling close up of feet on steps) having expressed dissatisfaction with the sheltered Tokyo life she has been living.

Tanaka

The film making is not conventional with particularly the first interiors often single,  vertical line emphasising, static takes where changing the performers’ position rather than edits  is used to vary the image. Only the leads seem to merit medium shot singles. Close-ups of documents punctuate the action. Moving camera shots are rare but striking and the piece uses murky chemical fades. The blind masseurs and kid performers recognisable from other Shimizu films turn up again - to little effect.

The support cast tend to merge and the setting contributes more than they do - the inn with it’s the sliding screen doors and tatami mat shared rooms and management advising “It is a great dishonor to have a guest hurt”, the spring where the men relax naked, the woods and river.

This one is short on information. No one mentions the war and the sub-titles don’t make clear that Ryo is a soldlier on leave (immediately before “The day that will live in infamy”) and we have to deduce Tanaka’s life style from the opening line about sweat washing the powder out of her skin and her later pondering having all her needs met.

The film’s picture of forties Japan is its major point of interest and often it’s not all that convincing or involving enough to ward off tedium. The film goes into the basket of pedestrian contemporary set shomin geki melos like Kinoshita's Nijûshi no hitomi / 24 Eyes or Mizoguchi's Gion no shimai / Sisters of the Gion Quarter.

 

Barrie Pattison 2021.