Jumping ahead 10 years in Shimizu’s catalogue is fascinating. I complained in yesterday’s post that Japanese Girls at the Harbor is not satisfying on a story level but delivers the goods visually. Seven years later, Shimizu has obviously matured as a director, refining his camera work, while telling simple but fully formed stories. His visuals are less visceral than in the early work, more controlled and functional but still awe-inspiring. The film tells the story of Nobuko, a young and idealistic teacher from the countryside who comes to the city to teach at a private girls school. Not everyone agrees with her methods, and a lot of the students make fun of her rustic accent, but her chief problems come from a brat named Eiko who’s father is a rich and influential man, which enables her to behave as she pleases without ever being reprimanded by the teaching staff. Nobuko, however, is dead set on teaching her good manners and respect. Her conflicts with Eiko escalate, until the girl mysteriously disappears from school grounds and Nobuko is on the verge of getting fired.
With Nobuko, Shimizu’s inquiry into class relations continues. I never talked about it while discussing Mr. Thank You, Children in the Wind and The Masseurs and a Woman, but all of these films explore class relations to a certain extent. Obviously, the bus driver Arigato-San chauffeurs people of different classes and we get exchanges between a young poor girl that is being sold into prostitution, a Westernized woman who smokes and drinks alcohol, and a wannabe bourgeois who wears a fake moustache and a cheap suit. In Children in the Wind, we see class relations through the prism of child hierarchies, as the kids of an incarcerated man are banished by their former clique. And in The Masseurs and a Woman, the masseurs interact with students, rich city people and inn owners without ever receiving attention, thus revealing how people of different social affiliations communicate and regard each other.
In Nobuko, Shimizu explores class relations on two levels. When the young teacher first comes into town, she lives at a geisha house owned by a relative where she can stay for cheap. When the principal of the school finds out about it she demands that Nobuko moves out. “A geisha house is no place to live for a teacher”, she says. Nobuko finally moves to the school’s dorms. Both the geisha house and the school are exclusively populated by women but there is a very clear social divide separating the two. When some of the geishas want to visit Nobuko on school grounds, it provokes a minor scandal and she tries to get them to leave as quickly as possible. Nobuko also befriends one of the young geishas, who’s aspiration it is to become “the best geisha of all.” At school, the girls want to be the best students of all, and Shimizu doesn’t need to do more than to draw this simple parallel to make us think about the different paths of life these girls will follow simply because they belong to different social stratums.
Obviously, the somewhat naïve teacher from the countryside and the spoiled student with an influential father everyone is scared of is the other arena where Shimizu lets clash social origins. “She’s special? But we must treat her equally”, exclaims Nobuko. But Shimizu is not on a communist quest to synchronize Japan’s children, rather he has something else in mind: “each child is different. Scold or praise, we must treat them all with affection.” That’s Nobuko talking at the end of the film, spelling out the moral of the story. Class origins don’t matter, Shimizu argues, we are all human and deserve to be treated as such, regardless of financial potency, gender, or education. In that, Nobuko carries a very humanist message, even though the director argues in the same breath that discipline should supersede self-indulgence, validating a rather Spartan approach to school education.
The composition of his frames is equally barren. Story and images thrive on simplicity and his staging is subtle, which dupes some viewers into thinking that Shimizu is a sloppy director. There is, however, a very clear arithmetic of his frames. I discussed in earlier posts how much Shimizu relies on a vertical axis on which the characters position themselves in relation to the camera. In Nobuko, Shimizu develops the vertical axis further on two counts. First, in a majority of the frames, he creates a point in the middle of the frame towards which all the elements of the image converge. Secondly, he activates the horizontal axis by using sideways tracking shots, or by populating the left and right corners of the frame with objects or people, which in turns accentuates the vertical axis on which the main action takes place. Some variations include populating the lower half of the frame and having the main action take place in the upper middle of the frame; or having the main action (usually two people talking) take place on the far left and right of the frame with an object blocking the middle of the frame (a sort of negative of his main composition); or having two people on the left and right of the frame walking towards each other (and, in some cases, passing each other) with the middle of the frame remaining immobile.
In a lot of cases, we get a sweeping lateral tracking shot at the beginning of a scene that picks up on the action after a few beats by halting the camera at the very moment it captures the characters interacting on the vertical axis in the middle of the frame. We are even treated to a few of his signature backward/forward “walk-and-talk” tracking shots during a hiking trip Nobuko undertakes with her students. But even these are restrained and less demonstrative, as everything else in the film. Most of the action takes place in interiors with sparse decors and a less inquiring camera than inside the bus in Mr. Thank You. But it is a delight to see how organized Shimizu’s shots are. Finding your style and sticking to it is one thing. Developing it and letting it mature is the sign of a true artist.
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