Les frères et les soeurs Toda

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.

When a respected businessman dies unexpectedly, his affairs turn out to be in disorder, and his sons sell off most of his goods quickly. His widow, Ayako Katsuragi, and her youngest, unmarried daughter, Mieko Takamine, become houseguests of their siblings.... but they show little filial love. Will Shin Saburi, the wastrel son, inspired by his father's death to go off to China and work hard, turn out to be this Japanese version of KING LEAR's Cordelia?

Ozu hadn't completed a film in four years. When he came back to the studios to make this, his style had shifted and settled. Now, although he still hung his studies of familial relationships on sturdy plots, he had settled on what would become his postwar trademark of long, still shots from a low perspective. There's clearly a bit of wartime propaganda in the movie, telling Japanese civilians that there's endless opportunity in China to get ahead without worrying about getting into those awkward situations of losing face.

Ozu would make another movie the following year, then not another until 1947.... first problems with Japanese censors, and then clearing his name with the American Occupation forces. However, here we see the mature Ozu. He was excellent. He would only get better.

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.

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.