Yasujiro Ozu - Woman of Tokyo (1933)

When Ryoichi learns from his girlfriend Harue that his sister Chikako is suspected of illegal prostitution, he rejects his girlfriend and violently confronts his sister about it. She admits to it but defends herself by saying that she sacrifices herself to pay for his college education. Ryoichi leaves his sister, roams about the streets of Tokyo and finally commits suicide.

It is interesting to see how, in Woman of Tokyo, Ozu treats masculinity through the prism of feminine hardship. Although it is Chikako who resorts to prostitution it is Ryoichi who is more devastated by it, within the confines of the film. Again we get a relatively weak masculine figure who's final strategy is to disappear. The 47-minute film never elaborates on the reasons for Chikako's choice or what effect her extra-curricular activity has on her and her self-esteem. What we get instead is Ryoichi's reaction to it.

David Bordwell argues that "the sadism of the humiliated Ozu male has seldom been so explicitly critized by a woman", citing Chikako who exclaims that Ryoichi is "stupid" for having committed suicide and who asks him "have all my hardships turned into you slapping me?" when he confronts her about her nightly activities. But Woman of Tokyo is, in my mind, much more a showcase of Ozu's very ambivalent relationship to women. A film in which a man commits suicide because his sister works as a prostitute without digging deeper into the sister's emotional world and her relationship to her brother and her customers is problematic to me. I get the social implications of Chikako's activity and how it could jeopardize the family (especially since she is investigated by the police), but I don't get why Ozu didn't explore his material more instead of turning a feminine plight into a masculine debacle.