Yasujirō Ozu | 非常線の女 (Hijōsen no Onna) (Dragnet Girl) / 1933

conventional objects

by Douglas Messerli

 

Tadao Ikeda (screenplay, based on a story by Yasujirō Ozu [James Maki]), Yasujirō Ozu (director) 非常線の女 (Hijōsen no Onna) (Dragnet Girl) / 1933

 

Although made in the 1930s Ozu’s Dragnet Girl was not truly rediscovered until the mid-1970s, long after the great Japanese director was known for his domestic dramas filmed with what is often described as a “meditative, nonintrusive approach to storytelling,” wherein the camera, as Eddie Muller describes it, is held “typically at a level simulating the eyeline of someone kneeling on a tatami mat.”

     This 1933 gangster film, self-consciously engaging with Hollywood noir and gangster movies, shows Ozu as a very different kind of director, the story told from the very personal viewpoints of its central figures, the ex-boxer now gangster Joji (Joji Oka), his gangster moll, Tokiko (Kinuyo Tanaka) who by day works as a seemingly innocuous typist in a firm where the bosses’ son is desperately trying to woo her into his bed, and Kazuko (Sumiko Mizukubo), a far more conventional woman working in a record shop whose brother Hiroshi (Kōji Mitsui) gets involved not only with boxing but with the gangsters who have come out of the boxing club, particularly Joji.

     Unlike Ozu’s later works, his camera in this film is a curious tool that takes the viewer everywhere, from standard head-on shots of the characters, exploring their bodies and faces as well from odd angles, while traveling endlessly over objects, hanging male hats, punching bags, typewriters in action and covered, teapots, yo-yos, record players, American Boxing posters, and even the RCA mutt Nipper. The director’s camera darts in and out of street stroller’s legs, cuts bodies away from their heads, and, in general, presents the viewer with an absolutely dizzying sense a reality that at times results in near vertigo, particularly when late in the film, Tokiko and Joji attempt to escape capture as they climb out over a roof of their nearby apartment building.

      That busy camera, in fact, often stands in for the real action strangely missing from this tale. We see Tokiko in her workplace; join Joji on a return to his old home in the boxing gym where the coach continues to try to lure him back to the ring; share with the couple, Joji and Tokiko, a night on the town in a restaurant dancing to jazz and where Joji, in a back room, slugs out one of his major gangland opponents; and return with the couple to their flophouse of a flat. Other scenes are played out in the record store where Kazuko works, on the streets, and in a poolhall. But by and large the plot seems almost attenuated. Although Joji is described as a gangster we are not completely clued in to what kind of unlawful activities he is actually involved. And he seems to derive most of his income from the money Tokiko takes home and perhaps from the sale of expensive rings and necklaces the bosses’ son keeps awarding her for her potential sexual services.

     The heart of this film lies in the actions and personalities of its central characters rather than in their actions. As Joji, Oka’s handsome profile along with the sneering allurement of his facial gestures dominate the film. He is clearly dangerous but simultaneously loveable and even kind to those who are loyal to him.

      Tokiko is also a kind of double-figure, at the office playing a hard-working, almost giggly office girl, while after work dressing up in sleek gowns and turning into a tough dame who knows only too well which women are after her man and which men might be a threat. She’s a tough-talking woman that gangsters like Joji and many a Hollywood thug depend on to sometimes pull them away from their own naiveté.

      Joji’s wonderful assistant Senko announces all arrivals and departures with the kind of dance that seems like an odd mix of Michael Jackson and the clumsy “postman” in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s film Teorema as he signifies his role as a marionette. It is he who introduces the “featherweight” boxer Hiroshi to Joji, changing the young student’s behavior and altering the lives of all the other film’s characters.

     In short, each of these characters is highly conflicted in dress, gesture, and behavior. The young student Hiroshi is perhaps the most complex. Still living at home with the sister, Kazuko, who has raised him alone, as the film begins the boy is still mostly good. But it’s clear that he desires to enter either the boxing world or the gangster society not because of any particular fascination with illegal activities, but because of the macho figures he associates with those worlds.

     As Ozu quickly portrays him, Hiroshi is absolutely in love with all things masculine. He secrets away in his schoolbook pictures of boxers, particularly the image of Joji, the way boys of a later generation might collect physique images and magazines; and he clearly perceives the very touch of another man’s boxing glove as a kind of love pat. Throughout the film, Hiroshi, his hands in near constant motion, reaches out for quick touches and embraces the men who surround him. He clearly almost deifies the male body, and even later in the film, when Joji slugs him for his thievery, he begs him to slug him again. He is a boy so desperate for the touch of a man that it has been transformed even into seemingly sado-masochistic gestures. It doesn’t seem as important to Hiroshi that he is being punished or even what he is being punished for as it does that his hero has actually laid hands on his body.

      In his essay for the 2014 San Francisco Film Festival, Muller summarizes the situation:   

 

      “Hanging heavily over this otherwise lightweight melodrama is the story of Hiroshi…Kazuko’s brother, who longs to be a boxer and yakuza—because he’s in thrall to the dashing Joji. Ozu comes daringly close to abandoning his usual obliqueness when depicting Hiroshi’s ardor for male companionship and camaraderie. It’s clear Kazuko isn’t trying to save her brother from a criminal life, but from a different ‘deviant’ lifestyle.”

 

      It is Kazuko’s worry for her brother that finally leads her to contact Joji, begging him to cease any contact with Hiroshi, and to free the boy of his association with men of his type. Dressed in traditional kimono and speaking in a gentle, pleading manner that macho men have always found irresistible in women whom they recognize they can easily dominate, Joji immediately dismisses the boy from his services, Hiroshi now being far too intoxicated by the all-male society in which he has entered to possibly give it up. As he has previously told Joji, no matter what he does, he will not give up his admiration for him, reacting to him much as Tokiko later does to Kazuko with words to the effect, “I really like you,” the affection perhaps being much stronger than the English language translation hints.

      But our attention shifts back to Joji who begins visiting Kazuko’s record shop and listening to the classical music on a newly purchased phonograph at home. Recognizing what has happened and determining to keep her man, Tokiko packs a gun and makes an appointment with Kazuko on the street, not unlike Kazuko’s previous meeting with Joji.

      The meeting does not go as planned, the girl reacting with smiles and kindness when Tokiko pronounces that she is “Joji’s friend,” clearly, even in this silent film, delivered in a tone that makes it obvious that he’s her man. But Kazuko only gushes over his kindness about Hiroshi, no territorial envy on her mind. Tokiko, unable to believe her naiveté, responds sarcastically, “That doesn’t mean that I’m your friend. Chances are we’re enemies.” Tokiko crosses the street, presumably preparing to leave what she would like to imagine as her victim, but observing only the confusion of the girl, particularly when she follows her, takes out the gun, challenging her, “Don’t you want to shoot me?”

     When Kazuko merely shakes her head “no,” again confused by the question, Tokiko tries once more to rouse the girl to anger, “Then I’ll shoot you.” Tokiko looks down, as if fated to accept whatever comes her way. It is only then that the tough moll realizes how foolish she has been, walking back towards Kazuko as she announces, “I hate to say this, but I like you.”

      She moves close to Kazuko, plants a kiss on her lips, and quickly backs away. Having angled his camera to the close placement of their legs, we do not witness the kiss, but as soon as Tokiko backs away, we see Kazuko touching her face in startlement of the gesture.

      “In subsequent scenes,” Muller observes, Tokiko giddily reveals that she now shares Joji’s infatuation with Kazuko, and throughout the rest of the film, even when she and Kazuko meet up again, she has nothing kind words for the woman and smiles when she sees her.

 

     Behind this strangely perverse lesbian scene, obviously, is perhaps an equally perverse love of their own traditional Japanese culture as symbolized by Kazuko, a pre-World War II clue of a general desire to return to the lost traditions and values. Certainly it explains Tokiko’s almost immediate attempt to become the “other,” to replace what Kazuko represents to Joji. Tokiko brings home food which she probably is unable to cook and insists that she too can be the good girl, the image of femineity which has so completely and suddenly altered her man.

      Joji is rightfully skeptical, which ends in an argument and her leaving, Joji tossing after her all of her clothing and the housewife goods she has purchased, as close as putting a grapefruit into his moll’s face as Japanese cinema will ever get—my reference of course being the US gangster film, The Public Enemy (1931).

      Suitcase in hand, Tokiko returns to the nightclub which she and Joji attended most nights, standing with a drink in hand while tears stream down her face. There she meets up with the business owner’s son, Okazaki (Yasuo Nanjo), whose pleas that she finally spend the night with him finally reach her—at least so it appears.

      Admitting that she is none of the things which she pretends to be, she is accepted by Okazaki nonetheless and taken back to his apartment. Tokiko, however, is still savvy enough to realize that such a relationship will never survive the bed of a few weeks or nights, and quickly leaves him, returning to Joji in admission of that she is still a delinquent, a punk like him.

       The two almost make-up until Kazuko again shows up to his door, wondering if he might have seen her missing brother. He rudely sends her off, explaining to Tokiko that he had to speak to her that way in order to get her out of his system.

       But she has still obviously changed them, as Tokiko attempts to and finally succeeds to convince Joji to give up his life as a criminal and move somewhere else where they can begin again. They seem also ready to begin a new life until Hiroshi finally shows up, admitting that he has stolen a rather large sum of money from the record store cash register which he cannot pay.

       Suddenly Joji is convinced that he must live up to his responsibility and help Hiroshi. And they plan one last heist, this against the very business where Tokiko works. It is quite obvious, however, that it is not Hiroshi they are hoping to protect, but his sister who will surely lose her job and her reputation when the fact of the missing money is discovered.

       In an almost comic scene, the two rob the bosses’ son in his office, forcing him to pay in cash.

The heist goes awry, however, and the police are quickly on their tail. Tokiko is charged with returning to their flat to pack their suitcases, whole Joji delivers the money to Hiroshi. But when he returns she is not packed and refuses to help him escape, insisting that the only way they can

truly begin over is to turn themselves in, serve their sentences, and come out as changed people.

 

     Joji refuses, attempting to escape while dragging Tokiko along with him. But finally, she shoots him in the leg and, unable, to continue their escape, they are forced to wait for the police, as they huddle together in their last gasps of passion for a very long while.

      In the end, accordingly, despite the several social and sexual abnormalities of Ozu’s work, nearly all of its figures are brought back into the fold of normative society—all presumably because of the traditional icon of Japanese conventionality Kazuko.  

 

Los Angeles, December 22, 2023

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (December 2023).