TRAVELS WITH HIROSHI SHIMIZU
Thanks in no small part to home video Westerners are gradually growing aware of the oceanic depth and diversity of Japanese cinema. Hardly a month seems to go by without the revelation of a major director whose work was previously unknown or barely suspected.
The current example, arriving by grace of the Criterion Collection’s no-frills Eclipse line, is Hiroshi Shimizu, who directed more than 100 films between 1921 and his death in 1966. Of these perhaps one — “Mr. Thank You” (1936) — has received any real exposure here, even on the museum circuit.
A close friend of and occasional collaborator with Yasujiro Ozu, Shimizu commanded a style as distinctive and almost as idiosyncratic as Ozu’s, though pointed in the opposite direction. Whereas Ozu preferred to work in the studio, and as much as possible within the walls of a modest middle-class home, Shimizu found his inspiration working on location, taking his cast and crew to remote, preferably mountainous corners of Japan. Hence the title of the Eclipse collection, “Travels With Hiroshi Shimizu,” which contains “Mr. Thank You” and three other films: “Japanese Girls at the Harbor” (1933), “The Masseurs and a Woman” (1938) and “Ornamental Hairpin” (1941).
Shimizu’s characters seem to be almost constantly on the move: Both “The Masseurs” and “Ornamental Hairpin” are set in country inns among travelers, and “Mr. Thank You” takes place on a bus as it descends from a mountain village toward a train station at the far end of the valley. (The title comes from the nickname by which the unfailingly polite driver, played by Ken Uehara, is known throughout the region.)
And if Shimizu’s characters are not in motion, his camera often is. The most distinctive element of his style is his taste for tracking shots that move independently of actors, cutting diagonally across the visual field to reveal new rooms and new spaces. On location he likes to go along with his characters as they hike down roads or steep paths, the camera looking back from a moving mount, preceding the human figures and framing them within an ever-changing landscape.
For Shimizu life is a continuous series of transitional moments, a theme most perfectly expressed in “Mr. Thank You” as the driver travels along his route, stopping to pick up or drop off passengers, or to exchange pleasantries with the regulars he comes across along the way. (In one remarkable scene he stops to talk to a young Korean woman who is part of a road construction crew — an expression of sympathy for an oppressed minority that would have required real courage in imperialist Japan.)
In the back of the bus a village girl sits with her mother, who is taking her to Tokyo to be sold into prostitution; the driver’s developing sympathy for her plight forms the film’s main, and largely unverbalized, plotline. Characteristically, Shimizu does not show the bus arriving at the terminal, but cuts instead to the return trip, with Mr. Thank You now accompanied by his new fiancée.
Another romance between transients is at the center of “Ornamental Hairpin,” set in a mountain spa where a soldier (Chishu Ryu, Ozu’s favorite leading man) is drawn to a geisha (the great Kinuyo Tanaka, once married to Shimizu) trying to escape her life in Tokyo. Once again movement provides the ruling metaphor: the soldier has cut his foot on the geisha’s hairpin, left behind in the spa’s soaking pool, and with her help he is learning to walk again.
The ultimate challenge is a flight of stairs leading to a forest temple: if the solider can make it to the top without crutches, it will be time for him to go home, putting an end to their flirtation. The parallel camera movement that Shimizu uses to describe the final ascent represents a perfect blending of formal beauty and emotional power; it belongs with the climax of Kenji Mizoguchi’s “Sansho the Bailiff,” also featuring Tanaka, as one of the most devastating moments in Japanese film. (Eclipse, $59.95, not rated)
Da The New York Times, 15 marzo 2009
