1937 was a busy year for Japanese cinema, and films were produced in quick pace, often impacting the quality. Shimizu Hiroshi turned out six films that year, among them "Kaze no naka no kodomo" (Children of the Wind), which was a critical hit and was sent to Venice film festival. "Wind" showed that Shimizu had time to complete and polish the work, but this wasn't the case with most of the films that Shochiku delegated for the director. "Koi no wasurete" (Forget Love for Now, 1937) is a much more conservative maternal melodrama, that does feature children prominently, but doesn't feel like a particularly Shimizu-esque work. The screenplay is by the societal Saito Ryosuke, who later co-wrote Ozu's fallen woman narrative "Kaze no naka no mendori" (A Hen in the Wind, 1948).
Michiko Kuwano plays a single-mother named Oyuki, who has no other alternative, but to work as a bar hostess, in order to support her young son. The film follows the mother's bleak life, as well as the son's difficulty of finding friends, when he has a mother that everybody thinks is a bad influence. It's mom-shaming in a very rough form, and for myself, the fact that I have seen the similar narrative done better both in Japanese films, and foreign ones, lessens the impact of the Shimizu film. It's just one more to the pile, and for a talented director like him, not a particularly memorable effort.
One can see, how this would have been made differently in the post-war. Besides the fact that the gender roles would have improved, it would have most likely been more individualist, instead of the broad strokes used by Shimizu and Saito here. This is not bad, but it is also not a game changer. If you want to feel sad for 73 minutes, give it a watch as a part of a larger Shimizu retrospective.
