What Did The Lady Forget? is a terrific little gem and it becomes more and more clear to me that one of the aspects of Ozu's work that are the most consistently overlooked or ignored is his use of humor. For me, What Did The Lady Forget? is a comedy first and foremost. All the themes Ozu touches on are revealed through humorous situations and I couldn't help but laugh out loud at lines like "It's terrible that she makes you play golf" or "something dreadful happened. Aunty read the postcard". Lady has somewhat of a rocky start but it becomes apparent pretty quickly that it's a film about refusing conventions, evading responsibility, and keeping up appearances, which is not what Ozu is generally known for.
Komiya, a medical professor who is mostly interested in reading the paper and spending quiet hours in his study, is bossed around by his authoritative wife Tokiko and sent on a golfing trip over the week end he does not want to go to. Instead, he finds refuge at his assistant's house and spends his time drinking at a bar. His niece Setsuko finds him there and insists that he takes her to a Geisha house. When she gets home late at night drunk, both most cover up their lie the best they can in order to avoid Tokiko's wrath.
In the world of What Did the Lady Forget?, convention dictates that people behave in a certain way, but they are very reluctant to do so. Early in the film, two boys have to do homework, and Komiya's assistant Okada is talked into tutoring them. But neither of them want to do what they're supposed to. The boys begin to play a game with a globe and Okada sits there and enjoys the luxury of not having to teach some recalcitrant boys. Komiya, as we have seen, does not want to play golf. Setsuko smokes (which makes for a great visual gag when she tosses her cigarette to Komiya right before Tokiko enters the room) and drinks against conventions. This, of course, is not Ozu making a sociological point but is used as a comic device that makes for a lot of the film's charm. Another source of humor is Ozu's mocking of the upper-middle class. Their manners and behaviors are revealed to be void of any meaning. Everything is just a facade. And when things get serious, they reveal themselves to be surprisingly tactless.
In that, and the obsession with numbers by a lot of the characters at the beginning of the film, What Did The Lady Forget? clearly foreshadows Brothers and Sisters of the Toda Family. Lady is smaller in scale but every theme Ozu will later develop with Toda is present, and it reveals how clear of an agenda Ozu had during his whole career. Chiefly, it is the demise of masculine authority that he highlights. And where An Inn In Tokyo or I Was Born, But… examined male devaluation through their work environment (or lack thereof), Toda and Lady approach the theme from the point of view of absence. Be it because the death of the patriarch, or a general lack of interest in taking part in familial activities like in Komiya's case, family ties disintegrate and only a selfish act can remedy the situation. Here, Komiya reasserts his authority by slapping his wife in the face, which betrays a questionable attitude towards women on Ozu's part. Be it as it may, Ozu believes in radical behavior in order to really achieve something. In An Inn In Tokyo it is stealing, and the outcome is a lot bleaker in that case, in Toda Family it is relocating part of the family to another country. Maybe my frame of reference is too narrow because I haven't seen enough pre-war Ozu yet, but I am curious to see how this theme will manifest itself in other early Ozu films.
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