Sono yo no tsuma

Ozu makes the best of what appears to be an uncharacteristic potboiler assignment involving a man (Tokihiko Okada) driven to crime to help his wife and ailing daughter, chased down by a cop (Fuyuki Yamamoto who looks like a Japanese Charles Bronson) who suddenly faces a moral dilemma. The characters are clearly played for genre type, but great performances make it special -- especially by Emiko Yagumo as the fiercely protective wife -- and Ozu achieves a feeling of moral resolve and atonement through personal sacrifice similar to what he did in WALK CHEERFULLY.

A desperate man with a sick daughter decides to commit a robbery in order to help her. He begins to feel remorse though, which makes him question his decision.

Ozu made twenty-six movies in his first five years as a director, including this one. He made silent films after silent films began to go out of style, and he made crime films before he went on to do the things he is better known for.

Here we have a mixture of crime and love, and a bit of necessity. Is it wrong to steal bread if you or a loved one are starving? Some would say yes, some no. This story brings that question to the forefront, though it steps it up a notch when the father has to physically confront his victim.

I didn't expect a crime movie to be the most Ozu film in his early career, but this story of, essentially, three people in a room ends up the quiet, introspective look at choices, change, and the inevitability of people adapting to new things is as much in line with Tokyo Story or Late Autumn as anything else so far. On the other hand, it's also his most visually striking work, with Ozu wearing German Expressionistic and Hitchcockian influences on his sleeve, especially in the opening ten minutes or so.

We start with a daring robbery. A masked man holds up a bank at the beginning of the night, getting away with a handful of cash as the area gets surrounded by cops. This man is Shuji (Tokihiko Okada), and this gets contrasted with a mother, Mayumi (Emiko Yagumo) taking care of her sick daughter, Michiko (Mitsuko Ichimura), with the doctor (Tatsuo Saito) telling the mother that the little girl should be fine, if she survives the night. Until the morning, it's touch and go. How will these stories interconnect? Well, Shuji gets a ride home in a taxi driven by an undercover policeman (Chishu Ryu), and that home is to Michiko, the robbery done as an act of desperation for funds to help treat the little girl.

Now, I had this thought as the stories came together. Well, first I thought the title of the film was indicating that Mayumi would be forced to pretend to be Shuji's wife, but nope, they're just married. However, I was thinking that this earnest bit of crime was something the movie would quickly forgive as necessary in the face of hard financial times. And yet...it never does it. It's empathetic towards the action, but never to the point of deciding to let him off. He's going to be punished for his crime, even if no one was hurt and the money gets returned. He still needs punishment, and everyone acknowledges it.

And that subtext is what gives the film its power and interest. The story is very spare. It's only 65-minutes long, and I think most other directors would get, maybe, forty minutes out of this (Bresson could probably get 75). Not a whole lot actually happens, most of the film being set in the apartment (covered in movie posters, Ozu was obviously a huge movie nerd). The only plotworthy things of note are the passing back and forth of a pair of guns (one owned by Shuji, the other by the policeman) that force the Policeman to sit still for a long stretch of time and see the earnestness of Shuji taking care of little Michiko while Mayumi holds the policeman in place with the implied threat of violence.

That stretch allows the policeman his space for empathy, and the film becomes a series of long, meaningful looks. It's about subtext and subtlety as everyone knows exactly where the story will end, and yet no one is eager to see it happen. Shuji doesn't want to go to jail. Mayumi doesn't want to lose her husband. Michiko doesn't understand much, but we often see her reaching out for her daddy when she's not asleep. And the policeman just understand the situation. It's a slow, steady march towards a predetermined spot, determined the moment Shuji drew that gun on the bank tellers.

Sure, the opening still has some open questions (why not just arrets Shuji when he gets in the car?), but much like Ozu's other early work, those early moments that lack clarity give way to clear-eyed handling of a quieter, human dimension. And that's where Ozu finds his staying power as a filmmaker: settling into small moves with grand implications but told in intimate, quiet ways.

That being said, the opening questions and the startling lack of story stretched very thin hold me back slightly on the film. I mean, the ending is essentially ten minutes of looking back and forth from the door to the apartment, down the stairs, and out to the street. I feel something as it plays out, but it's stretching out a moment very, very thin.

Still, I think it's a worthwhile and very short discovery from Ozu's silent period. It presages where he'll go and define his work through the forties and fifties, but doing it in a completely different genre. It's good, interesting, surprisingly moving, and...too long. But that's a relatively minor sin.

While the characters themselves are stock figures (the good man pushed to criminal activity, the faithful wife, the dutiful but understanding cop, etc.), the execution of this one-room thriller is superb stuff. It has a noirish vibe that feels nothing like Ozu's more famous postwar work. While not a must-see, it is taut, entertaining, and enough of an anomaly in the career of one of cinema's masters to warrant a single viewing from cinephiles.

It's one of Ozu's gangster movies from the early 1930s... only it's really about a father whose daughter is so sick he commits a robbery to pay the bills, then gets easily tracked down at the child's bedside.

A brief survey of online discussion refers to this as one of Ozu's "early, non-typical silents." It's the same attitude I complained about in my review of DRAGNET GIRL as if John Ford got off the train from Maine in 1915 and announced "I'm ready to direct How Green Was My Valley. What do you mean this is Azusa?"

It's slow and contemplative and allows the audience to get inside the characters' heads and is a fine little movie. What it doesn't do is use the same, low perspective and simple shots that Ozu would cultivate after the Second World War.... almost certainly because it would not occur to him for fifteen or twenty years that they would work. It's too bad he didn't talk about it with the geniuses on the Internet. They know everything.