Japanese Girls at the Harbor is the most Ozu-esque Shimizu I have seen so far. From the dramatic arc of the characters, over mysterious cut-aways to certain shots that can be found in both director’s catalogues, there are a lot of parallels. Shimizu, however, has a very distinct visual identity and I am constantly amazed at his creativity and evocative camera use. In this silent film, we have less forward/backward tracking shots of people walking from or towards the camera (Shimizu seems to have taken that up a little later), but jump cuts and fades that translate the characters emotional states. The story concerns Sunako and Dora, a pair of high school students living in the harbor town of Yokohama. Sunako falls in love with the fashionable hoodlum Henry who, in turn, falls prey to Yoko, a sort of femme fatale. When Sunako surprises them at a local church, she attacks Yoko and flees to another town where she becomes a prostitute. Years later, she comes back to Yokohama and works at a geisha house. Meanwhile, Dora and Henry have married, but when Henry meets Sunako again his feelings for her are awakened anew and he has to make a decision between the two former best-friends.
A lot of the ideas present in Japanese Girls at the Harbor can already be found in Eternal Heart, released four years prior. Two women, one more traditional (in this case Sunako, who is seen in a geisha kimono for most of the film), one more modern, fighting for the love of a man who has to decide between “Japanese” or “Western” values. But where “modern” women were depicted as shallow and materialistic in Eternal Heart, they are shown as domesticated and submissive (Dora) in Japanese Girls, characteristics attributed to “traditional” women in the earlier film. Of course, Sunako is not a “traditional” woman in the same sense as Toshie is in Eternal Heart. But this reversal of the roles is certainly interesting, especially as it comes at the heels of a crime committed by Sunako that changed the lives of everyone involved.
A new element seems to be that men are shown as essentially weak and in crisis – a theme Ozu tackled time and time again. Henry stumbles from girl to girl, apparently without ever really knowing what he wants. It will be Sunako who makes him come to his senses at the end of the movie. Then, there is Miura, an awkward and poor artist who is enamored with Sunako and even follows her back to Yokohama where she treats him like her personal servant. He is seen washing clothes and dishes without ever getting any recognition from his crush. But it will be Miura who forces her to face her past and come clean with the people around her, making his role a little more ambivalent. The problem with all of this is that the script has a lot of great moments, and Shimizu certainly makes the best of it visually, but it never amounts to a fully coherent narrative. Shimizu is, of course, known for his free floating, improvised approach (Mr. Thank You being a prime example) but Japanese Girls at the Harbor is a foul compromise between improvisation and scripted content, as the narrative is stripped to a bare minimum but not episodic enough to function within Shimizu’s preferred modus operandi.
Behind the camera, however, Shimizu is at the top of his game. He bookends the movie with beautiful shots of boats leaving the harbor as a symbol of change and hope. The evocative location shooting is beautiful without being showy. He uses visual repetition to enhance the narrative. One of the most arresting moments of the film occurs in the church where Sunako sees Henry with Yoko. We get a long shot of her standing ominously in the door like a bad ghost. We close in on her in five subsequent jump cuts, until we arrive on an extreme close up of a gun in her hand. The exact same jump cuts occur again in reverse, until we’re back to the long shot of her standing in the door. Not only does this rather brute editing contrast with the calm and leisurely pace before that scene, but it evokes the emotions of both Sunako and Henry/Yoko in very simple terms. At the end of the film, Sunako happens on Yoko who lays dying in her bed. As soon as she sees her, we get jump cuts again, closing in on Yoko. The visual repetition takes us back to their state of mind during their last encounter.
Another visual trait of the film is to let character who leave a room fade out of the image like ghosts disappearing, instead of having them physically leave the room. This occurs in the second half of the movie, where Sunako literally has to face the ghosts of her past. To a lesser degree, Shimizu uses these fades to signal the passing of time, a technique still largely used today, when we see characters in the same location in various arrangement as time progresses. We also get a few cut-aways that seem unmotivated by character POV’s. This mirrors Ozu, but Shimizu is not as interested in it as his friend was and uses it more as punctuation than to tie together different scenes. This is especially the case in a climatic scene between Dora and Sunako, where we constantly cut back and forth between the two women having a heart to heart, and exterior shots of the back yard at night under the rain.
The more I write about it, the more it seems like Japanese Girls at the Harbor might have been a sort of test run for Shimizu to try out different visual techniques. Of course I haven’t seen enough of his movies (nor are there enough available) to corroborate my theory, but while the director clearly put his stamp on this movie, there are new elements I had never seen before (cut-aways, jump cuts, different uses of fades and fades to black). There is a quote from Shimizu saying, “next year, I’m going to make only three films the way the company wants me to, and in exchange I can make two films that I want.” I wonder if Japanese Girls might be one of the studio movies. Not that it’s bad. It simply feels like a tentative work of an inquisitive director who had a strong enough output (and creativity) to use some of his movies as dry runs. Still exciting, but less substantial.
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