Ozu Blogging (I)

(Context: The Northwest Film Forum in Seattle has been hosting an Yasuhiro Ozu retrospective, screening 27 of Ozu’s 33 surviving films. I’ve managed to see six of them so far, and I may yet squeeze in a seventh. This experience has, unsurprisingly, convinced me that Ozu is entirely deserving of his reputation as one of the great filmmakers of the 20th century. I’ll try to demonstrate why in a series of posts. This post contains “spoilers” about a 1936 Japanese film unavailable on VHS or DVD that shouldn’t detract from the viewing experience you almost certainly won’t have.)

There’s a devastating scene about 2/3 of the way through Yasuhiro Ozu’s first talkie, The Only Son. This stark, moving film can in many ways be viewed a warm-up for Ozu’s 1953 masterpiece Tokyo Story, as the story structure is similar, they’re both centered around parents from rural Japan visiting their children in a rapidly modernizing and bewildering Tokyo.

In The Only Son, a widow who works in a silk factory is convinced by the local schoolteacher to send her bright son to high school and college against her better judgment and at considerable financial and personal expense. It’s his tales of the extraordinary opportunities that await him that convince her: “Study hard, and become a great man,” she tells the bewildered 14 year old.

The bulk of the film takes place in 1936. When she visits her son in Tokyo, she is distressed to find a bored, broke night school teacher, married to the daughter of a restaurant owner and living in a tiny, cheap apartment with their infant son. Much like Tokyo story, the son spends money he can ill afford in an effort to entertain her mother (she falls asleep during a movie), and the awkward tension grows.

Unlike Tokyo story, the tension eventually comes to a head: a heated, late night argument between mother and son. He demands to know if she’s dissapointed in how he turned out. She doesn’t answer directly, but it’s clear that she is. He tries to explain that Tokyo is full of people just like him, and only a tiny fraction of them have any chance at greatness. She chastises him for his defeatist attitude and reveals that the costs of his education forced her to sell her house, and she now lives in a factory dormitory. As the argument progesses, it becomes crystal clear to the viewer that no conclusion based on mutual understanding is possible given the experiences of the two parties. As they run out of things to say, we see the Son’s wife stirring in the background, obviously hearing every word of the argument. As the mother and son stare at each other in silence, we’re left listening to the weeping young wife, who has tried very hard to please her mother-in-law. The scene ends with the camera moving (and you know it’s important when Ozu moves the camera, because he almost never does) toward the sleeping infant. I’m sure this scene was utterly devastating in 1936, but watching it knowing what is likely in store for this struggling family in the ensuing decade makes it even more so.

Also unlike Tokyo Story, this movie makes a gesture toward a resolution of this profound generation gap–the mother witnesses an act of kindness and sacrifice by her son, evidence that he is a good man regardless of his station in life, and experiences a moment of pride. But this is no happy ending–the highly ambiguous final scenes suggest that this moment provides insufficient comfort as she returns home to live out her life in back-breaking drudgery. The emotional trajectory of this film is uniquely powerful–from the deep sadness of a seemingly intractable familial conflict caused by the social dislocations of modernization, relief at the tentative resolution through an act of kindness, and the final devastation of realizing that it’s not enough. What Ozu is able to get out of such a simple story is just one example of his mastery.