Les frères et les soeurs Toda

This Yasujirô Ozu film came out just before Japan went to war with the United States. In many ways, it's very typical of any Ozu film. It uses the stationary camera set low to the ground (so the viewer is looking upward at the characters in many scenes, it has a simple plot about families and is centered on normal middle-class Japanese life. This is not a complaint but there is a sameness to Ozu's films that no other director quite achieved.

When the film begins, an extended family is having a day out. When it's over, the family patriarch is happy--telling his wife how it was a perfect day and how wonderful it was to see his kids and grandkids. Only moments later, the man slumps over and soon dies. Now the family is called back for the funeral and everyone must decide what to do with their mother now that father has died. Sadly, through the course of the film you realize that the kids are all very wrapped up in their own lives and no room in their hearts for their mother.

Other than the print being slightly degraded here and there, this DVD from the Criterion Collection is in pretty good shape. As for the story, I think how much you enjoy it will have a lot to do with how many Ozu films you've seen and how patient you are. The film is slow-moving (like many of his film) and the sameness of his films left me a bit bored after a while. Understand, I have probably seen at least 40 of his films. Worth seeing but certainly not among the director's best or most memorable.

There's a three year gap between Ozu's previous film, What Did the Lady Forget?, and this, and it's because Ozu went to war in China. He was part of a chemical weapons unit, was stationed in or near Nanking, and...probably committed war crimes. Heck, just the chemical weapon part is a war crime. I wouldn't bring it up, but one character does have a line about needing to put people in China in line, so...Anyway, the movie itself is another family drama, well written and performed in Ozu's increasingly understated way. Taking a dramatic point that could be used to start a melodrama, Ozu instead moves it in his own direction.

The patriarch of the Toda family, Shintaro (Hideo Fujino), suddenly dies after his 69th birthday, leaving his wife (Fumiko Katsuragi) and youngest daughter, Setsuko (Mieko Takamine), largely helpless in the face of his overdue financial burdens. The rest of the children, all adults, have to figure out how to deal with this, and it amounts to selling their mother's house and then accepting her and Setsuko into their homes.

The problem is a human one. Little dramas break out that make the situations intolerable.

It starts with Shin'ichiro (Tatsuo Saito) and his wife Kazuko (Kuniko Miyake). They're happy to bring them in, but Kazuko is particular about the new arrivals not to interfere with their lives as set out. The big detail is that the mother and Setsuko must not interrupt her when she has guests over. Which...they don't. They come home one night from being out, trying to avoid the party completely, and sidestep the party that has gone on too long. This irritates Kazuko because they should have known to introduce themselves, a disagreement that leads to Kazuko kicking the two out of the house to go to the next youngest sibling.

This gets repeated a few times, and it's weird how petty everything ends up feeling. That's obviously the point in the end, but it's weird how we can get caught up in it at the same time. It's not that we're siding with Kazuko. It's obviously petty in the moment, but the understated tone is what helps sell these moments. No one is screaming. The worst things get is some heightened voices. It's restrained and intentional, which gives the moments believability without delving into melodramatics.

The voice of reason comes from Shojiro (Shin Saburi). He didn't believe it when Shintaro's health suddenly deteriorated and missed his final days. He left shortly afterwards for China (he's the one saying that people in China need to get slapped around a bit) under the assumption that his family would take care of their mother and younger sister as was their duty (Shin-ichiro is first because he's the eldest and it's his responsibility). When he discovers that the family has shunted their mother and youngest sister to a house on a property they own that's been essentially condemned, he's angry and does what he has to.

And it's a satisfying moment where things play out in a cathartic fashion, proving that Ozu was still able to play by normal dramatic rules.

But that's never the point of an Ozu film. The point is this examination of change within the context of family, and it's where the meat of the film always resides. The idea of responsibility in times that move on despite our desire to keep things the same, this film's change initiating with Shintaro's death, all told in this restrained style, increasingly told from cameras placed on the floor. Perhaps the effect is a bit muted because of Shojiro's absence and the pettiness of it all, but it does end up working in the end. It's not Ozu's best work, but it's another example of his commitment to style and effectiveness in storytelling.

Todake No Kyodai wonderfully captures Japanese social mores in its most regrettable form. If you wouldn't know better, you'd think that the people inhabiting the various interiors (almost all of the movie takes place indoors) are mere acquaintances. Strong socio-specific communicative regulations pervade every conversation, every movement, every wink of the eye.

I don't know much about Japanese society, but the fact that the family's mother is given the cold shoulder (after the pater familias had deceased) stroke me as a critique against individualized (westernized?) modern Japan.

I would also like to mention a nice, though unintended effect the movie had on me: the copy has aged gracefully and at times provides cool hallucinating screen compositions and distorted rainfall sounds, which are welcome diversions from the otherwise monotonous goings-on in the still home environments.

As usual, you can expect a lot of visual purity from the Ozu movie. This has immaculate framing and great compositions. Except that you can experience the same impeccable cinematic style in any of his other 50 movies, and a better story to boot. I tried to immerse myself in this lineage tale of misunderstandings and family breakdown, but I couldn't help but find it stilted.

I admittedly understand that it is a completely foreign culture to begin with, and a culture of Imperial Japan to boot. Be that as it may, the way the script portrays the supposed disrespect the eldest sister exhibits to the mother is the most spurious domestic argument imaginable, where it is simply impossible for me to gauge "the big deal," so to speak. Have Japanese families lived in perfect harmony before the turn of the century and the Meiji era? Have they never kept information from each other or had misunderstandings about how they should all act when the guests come over? Was there seriously no better way of demonstrating that they didn't want the pair there beyond this plastic irritability with a mother and younger sister melodramatically kneeling in front of the portrait of the late patriarch? Oh, those were better times, indeed. Or were they? Beyond the group photo scene, there wasn't even a good impression of how he ruled the family except for the debts that he left them.

Ultimately, of course, the emancipator son, who, without even knowing what happened, immediately assumes they were forced out and condemned to the villa. The cabin that they say is dilapidated and that they won't even sell seeing it is that bad. Which is an even more dishonest statement than the arguments. Looks cozy to me. Just the same, he rescues them and takes them to Tianjin. Good for them. They'll get in on the ground floor in China. 1941 is just about time.

Ozu enters William Wyler terrain with a somber upscale family drama about a mother and daughter who are shuttled in unwelcome fashion from one family member's home to another following the death of the family patriarch. The thematic elements of displacement within a family unit anticipate TOKYO STORY -- there's even a bedtime scene between the mother and daughter that echoes one in the later film. There's a startling lack of music in this film, esp. during Ozu's normally music-filled transitional shots, that contribute to an overall sense of tense unease that touches on what might have been the general wartime state of mind among Japanese at that time. The war makes a subtle appearance in the form of the youngest son who offers to take the unwanted family members with him to settle in China -- a moment which might be aligned with Imperialist propaganda, though in a fascinating way: the Chinese "frontier" seems presented as a place where Japanese society can escape its social hypocrisies and begin anew.