Shimizu’s films are often preoccupied with women forced into servitude by a hostile society, and geisha and sex workers are a recurring presence. Their subordination is marked by scent: In Forget Love For Now (1937), the perfume that a single mother has to wear to her job as a bar hostess causes her son to be bullied when his friends smell it on him, kicking him out of their group “because your mom is bad.” The smell of the perfume marks the mother as socially deviant, a condition that spreads to her son like a contagion and initiates a slide into delinquency that eventually ends in tragedy.
I was seized by the very Louise-like notion that I could make myself feel better by ordering a Himalayan salt lamp
As I embarked on my quarantined viewing project, the films started to reveal themselves as pricklier and more ambiguous than I remembered. Their explorations of what it means to exist in a public space, enmeshed within a web of relations with other people, celebrate the possibilities that emerge from that position just as much as they brood over the dangers that lurk there. They shed light on some of the less salubrious aspects of communal existence that, as we start to stagger back into the world like dazed bears after a long hibernation, we may have overlooked or forgotten.
