Une femme devrait être aimée

Partially lost, A Mother Should Be Loved continues Ozu's tap-dancing between the melodrama obviously popular in Japan at the time and his own quiet mode of making human stories. I'm a bit muted on the reaction to the film overall, and I'm not sure if it has anything to do with the missing opening and closing reels. If the descriptive texts are anything to go buy, they're mostly establishing action and reflective action at the beginning and end without touching on the actual drama. I think the issue is more about the melodramatic roots of the action, and the film never quite getting away from them.

A family of four, father Kajiwara (Yukichi Iwata), Mother (Mitsuo Yoshikawa), elder son Sadao (Seiichi Kato), and younger son Kosaku (Koji Mitsui). After planning a vacation trip, Kajiwara suddenly falls ill and dies (this all happens in the first, missing reel, so we never actually see Iwata act, just his photo). Struck by the sudden death of their father, the boys are too young to know how to process things, especially when Kajiwara's friend, Okazaki (Shinyo Nara), shows up and offers to take Sadao and raise him as his own son. There's reason for this, and it's the secret of the film, information that doesn't get revealed until years later after Sadao has applied for college.

You see, Mother is not actually Sadao's mother. Kajiwara was married before he married Mother, and Sadao is the issue from that first marriage. No one told him, though, and Mother kept the secret at Kajiwara's wishes. This is one of those things that seems intimately tied to Japanese culture because I find it hard to believe that this story, transplanted to America, would carry any of the same attempted emotional weight. Because Sadao treats this as a massive betrayal, and the rest of the movie hinges on his brewing hatred of Mother stemming from that lie. That ends up manifesting in Sadao's perception of different treatment between himself and Kosaku.

The main event around this involves dueling plans Sadao and Kosaku have that Mother needs to fund through her own meager means. Kosaku wants to go on a boat trip. Sadao has a friend, Hattori (Chishu Ryu), who lives in a geisha house and is indebted to the madame in charge, a situation Sadao wants to change by just paying Hattori's debt. Sadao's path of anger about it all is where the movie just kind of loses me. He gets really angry that Mother goes from funding Kosaku's trip to handing the money to Sadao for Hattori never really makes sense to me. It's something about Sadao seeing his mother-figure treat him too gingerly, or something?

It's the core drama of the film, and I just don't quite get it, which doesn't help with the surprisingly arch performances, especially from Kato. Yoshikawa is probably the best performance in the film, and that has to do with the fact that she's the most prominent performance working in Ozu's style.

However, aside from the particulars of the core dramatic moments, the film is really just another, accomplished, handsome Ozu production. I think the drama is too Japanese for me to connect with, but I can still get it to a certain degree. This wasn't made for Western audiences, despite Ozu's continued fanboyism of including Western movie posters in people's houses, and it probably worked better for Japanese audiences in the early 1930s. Still, I can admire the craft even if I feel that disconnect. And Ozu's craft is undeniable.

It's an accomplished, handsome film that I don't connect with emotionally. It's unfortunate, but it was bound to happen eventually. Is it because of the missing opening and closing reels? I don't think so.

The acclaimed Japanese filmmaker, Yasujiro Ozu often dealt with themes of parenthood and conflicts between different generations throughout his entire career. In many occasions he portrayed somewhat idealized father figures in films such as "There Was a Father" (1942), "Tokyo Story" (1953) and "An Autumn Afternoon" (1962), whereas maternity was a topic he seldom addressed. Although it is present in most of Ozu's films, he directly discussed it only in "A Mother Should Be Loved" (1934) and "Late Autumn" (1960). This is intriguing because as an adolescent Ozu mainly lived a fatherless life while, in turn, he lived almost his whole life with his mother. All this may seem pointless trivia, but it can be fruitfully associated with the film at hand since it deals with personal loss, and Ozu's father, in fact, passed away during production.

One essential matter which must be addressed is that "A Mother Should Be Loved" remains in a fragmented state. In other words, it is an incomplete film because the first and last reels of it are still missing. Therefore, my thoughts about the film are based on the British Film Institute DVD release of the film with a running time of approximately 70 minutes.

The film begins with two young brothers studying who are, out of the blue, called home due to their father's sudden death. A dramatic shock which breaks down the calm of everyday life resembles Ozu's earlier film "Where Now Are the Dreams of Youth" (1932) where a schoolboy's game of cunning at an exam is halted by the death of his father. In "A Mother Should Be Loved" this opening tragedy remains as an echo throughout the film, emerging mainly in the conflict between the brothers. Later on, one of the brothers learns that his mother isn't really his mother. In reality he was the child of his late father's first wife, and this realization causes another tragedy which is that of a break-up.

Although "A Mother Should Be Loved" is missing two whole reels, it still stands out as a fascinating film from Ozu's silent era. One can clearly detect Ozu's genius in composition and his unique poetry of space as well as his profound depiction of human disappointment, the fragility of existence and the transience of life. Moreover, what connects the film with Ozu's other work is that it is a known fact that Ozu devoted his whole career studying the disintegration of a family and such is the case in this film, too. The information that the elder brother is actually the son of his father's first wife is what triggers this dissolution.

Consistent with the director's subsequent work isn't, of course, something that would immediately make a film great. In fact, many have criticized "A Mother Should Be Loved", though most of them have also detected its interesting maternal theme and mature characterization. The most well-known western interpreter of Ozu, Donald Richie, for example, has stated that the film is "somewhat spoiled by melodrama." It is easy to identify with this remark but, on the other hand, Japanese film expert Alexander Jacoby has written on the film rather aptly, too: "While it is uncharacteristically melodramatic, 'melodrama' is a descriptive rather than an evaluative term, and Ozu brings an undoubted intensity to the scenes of conflict within the family."

What is more, this melodramatic aspect seems to carry a profoundly personal tone with it as Ozu indeed lost his own father during filming. In this sense, it is interesting that the film focuses on the relationship between a mother and a child, whereas Ozu usually studied father-daughter or father-son relationships. Thus "A Mother Should Be Loved" remains as a fascinating oddity of some sort in Ozu's prewar oeuvre as well as a memoir of a specifically painful and essential phase in his life which probably -- on one level or another -- led him to spend the rest of his days with his mother.