One aspect of Shimizu's oeuvre I hadn't yet discovered was his fondness for working with children. A lot of his films concern children's issues, he loved shooting with them, and he even adopted several orphans after World War II. Children in the Wind is a film told exclusively from the point of view of children and the honesty and simplicity with which Shimizu treats their problems is disarming and powerful. We follow the brothers Sampei and Zenta and how they deal with the threatening disintegration of their family when their father is arrested for embezzlement. Zenta is the calm and studious one ("a teacher's pet", says his brother), while Sampei is the delinquent one getting constantly in trouble. We spend a lot of time with the children, exploring their playing routines, examining their hierarchies. Children build up their own worlds and live in it, appropriating their surroundings as they need. Shimizu shows us all of it with a naturalistic frankness that reminds us of our own time when we were living in made-up worlds, wholly unaware of how cruel and unfair life can be sometimes.
Zenta and Sampei get a taste of this cruelty when their father is first fired from work and then arrested. The same kids they used to play with mock them and throw them out of their clique and Sampei is sent away to live with a retired school master. His behavior, of course, doesn't improve and Shimizu gives us a string of bittersweet scenes that show us how Sampei gets himself into trouble (one time, he runs away to see the "sea monsters") and how the adults react to that. Eventually, Sampei returns home and the father is released from prison when it turns out that he is innocent.
When the plot dictates the characters' actions, Children in the Wind is at its weakest. While the plot with the father is interesting in that we get to see the kids' reactions to it (and some wonderfully touching moments with their mother), Shimizu needs to resolve that conflict and the way in which he does it is not worthy of the rest of the film. Shimizu had no shooting script for Mr. Thank You and I wonder if there was an elaborate shooting script for Children of the Wind. A lot of the scenes with the kids feel improvised and more naturalistic for it, the dialogue is raw and unpolished, but very realistic. At no point did I have the impression to see child actors, I simply saw children behaving like children. It seems that Shimizu did not alter that at all. What could have been an overly sentimental film is saved by the film's honesty.
We get less tracking shots in this film, but Shimizu develops the vertical axis in his frames a lot more. Virtually in every shot, the characters walk towards or from the camera. I read some comments about the film that complained about the lack of staging in this movie. I would argue quite the opposite. His framing might not be as elaborate as his peers Ozu or Mizoguchi, but that doesn't mean that he is a careless director. Rather, the simplicity of his frames allow for a more natural feel of his films. Ozu's I Was Born, But… shares several similarities with Children in the Wind. The big difference is that Shimizu made a film from the children's perspective and Ozu made a movie from his own perspective. Two very different approaches that result in two very different films stylistically.
1 comments:
It's refreshing to read these comments about a film rarely seen by an essentially unknown director, and I think spot on. Shimizu is the only director of this period who so frequently tells a story from the viewpoint of the children. Cinematically, Shimizu had his own signature, and generally quite effective, if not as swimming add his contemporaries.
I disagree that Ozu's I Was Born, But is not mostly from the children's perspective,
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