Daigaku wa detakeredo

It's Ozu hundred percent: nice middle class guys understanding their mistakes as they get lessons of life from their loved ones. The social situation is harsh, but the tone of Ozu is mild, his empathy for the personages is total. Says Donald Richie in his monumental monograph consecrated to the great Japanese director, "he (Ozu) was always ready to accept human nature as he found it... (and) he went on to celebrate it."

I Graduated, But... is one of the movies of Ozu that is lost. Released in 1929, it was 100 minutes long. What remained are some fragments that have together a length of ten minutes. At least they offer a good summary of the plot.

It is unfortunate that the whole movie is no more. Critics consider it as marking the emergence of what is known as the "style of Ozu." You can see in the fragments in the fragments that remained: the poster with Harold Lloyd that keeps on coming on the screen, the two kids playing the ball, the scenes in the bar. As I said, it's Ozu hundred percent, the amazing Ozu.

As a 12-minute fragment is all that remains of this early work from Japanese master Yasujiro Ozu. Young man Tetsuo (Minoru Takada) is a recent college graduate looking for a job in Tokyo. His mother (Utako Suzuki) and wife Machiko (Kinuyo Tanaka) come to visit from the country, and he lies to them, saying that he has a job. It's only after his mother leaves that he confides in his wife that no jobs are hiring. Machiko eventually gets a job as a barmaid, embarrassing Tetsuo.

There's not a lot of time for nuance, but enough of Ozu's small, human touches remain to make this enjoyable. The universal appeal of the story line, relevant even today, is a plus. I also liked how American culture is present in several small ways, even in pre-WW2 Japan, such as the characters smoking Camel brand cigarettes, and a Harold Lloyd Speedy poster on the wall in Tetsuo's room. I wish the entire film had survived, but this fragment alone is worth seeing.

It's just a 12 minute fragment, but the portion that was preserved is entertaining and tells a sketch of a story in its own right, so I'm happy I saw this. There is a universality to the hunt for a job after college ("Excuse me, but I'm a college graduate"), and I smiled at him needing to fool his mother by pretending to go work (the "Nomoto at the office" intertitle followed by him playing with kids at the park). As an added treat, we get a movie poster for Harold Lloyd's Speedy from the previous year in the background. Watch it also for Kinuyo Tanaka in her very earliest film - she went on to a prolific career, with over 250 acting credits.

Only about eight minutes of Ozu's 70-minute feature seem to exist. It's concerned with Minoru Takada's seemingly endless quest to find a job, while loyal wife Kinuyo Tanaka tries to deal with the threat of loss of money and descent into the underclass. What happens when you do everything right, and nothing works?

It's not a new problem, and as the current COVID-19 pandemic continues into its second year, it's not one that has been solved. Ozu tells his story well, using only visuals: Takada's cigarette, dangling from his lips, but never lit. He can't afford to smoke it. Miss Tanaka at their apartment's balcony, looking at the view they may soon lose: what then? The inevitable movie poster on the wall, from Harold Lloyd's comedy hit SPEEDY: stuck on the bench, not given a chance to play.

I hope the full movie will turn up and I get a chance to see it.

A graduate is unable to find a job and tries to hide it from his immediate family. We only have a ten-something minutes long fragment of this, but it's still interesting as is. This film seeps with Ozu's signature sense of humanity, and let's keep our fingers crossed that someday somewhere they'll find the complete version and release it to the world.

The interesting part here is to see the skeleton without the fleshed sense of drama that is essential to most works of any piece. The framework itself works, all the more whetting one's appetite as to how the complete film would've been. The sensation of seeing something pan out so quickly is like stepping in a time warp of some sort — all the laws of dramaturgy and filmmaking are suddenly discarded, and we are given a film that's sort of a hyper-movie, almost like Welles or Marienbad, and we can piece it out ourselves, using the simplest referential context available to us: Ozu's filmography.