Chichi ariki

Being a fan of Ozu, you see here all the elements of his film making: The long shots, the trains, the interaction of family members etc. Kind of a precursor to the superior "Late Spring", this story revolves around a father and son's relationship. He works hard to get his son through school, so he can have a better life. However, they are not in the same place, so they do not see each other all that often. The film spans several years, in which the son goes from a young boy to a man. Chishu Ryu, who has starred in many Ozu films, is the father. Of course, he is great, he always is. Since the mother passed before the film even started, the boy only has the father, and their relationship is the heart of this film. A good to almost very good film, it was shown, appropriately enough, on Fathers Day on Turner Classic Movies. If you like Ozu, you'll want to see this. If you're new to him, check out the films with Chishu Ryu and Setsuko Hara, as well as his swan song "Autumn Afternoon" and even "I Was Born, But" before watching this. I liked it, it was a nice film. Its another worthy Ozu film, in a career that had so many of them.

This great film in the Japanese neorealism period is every bit as good as the best Italian neorealism films of the late 40s and early 50s. The Italian films are generally considered to be the best of that genre, but There Was a Father and films like Tokyo Story, a film about growing old in Japan and having your family leave you, are classics that have never been equalled in over 60 years. The secrets to these films are that they tell a simple story with simple techniques. There are no special effects, terrific chases, action sequences, or great suspense. Life is not like those things. These films are. Give yourself a treat and watch both of them.

Lesser, but, of course, still fine Ozu. It might come off as better if it had not been edited by American censors after the war, or if the existing print were a little less damaged (it's easily the worst print I've ever seen Criterion put on DVD, and they apologize profusely in the booklet for it; of course, it's of the best quality that is available). Chishu Ryu, in his first starring role, plays the titular father. The film opens with him quitting his job as a teacher after a student under his supervision has died. A widower, he moves away from the city with his young son in tow. After he finds a good school, he abandons his son to move back to Tokyo, where he can find better work. The meat of the film is the torn relationship. The son isn't bitter, exactly - more hurt that his father is far away. When he grows up, he wants to quit his job as a teacher to move to Tokyo to be with his father, but his father refuses the idea. Every person must do their job the best they can. While the message of every citizen doing their duty is a part of the film's wartime propaganda, it doesn't really come off as such. It feels more like Ryu is always punishing himself for his own career failures, or maybe that he fears that his son will be a failure like himself if he quits his job. Yet Ryu's character never comes off as cold - he loves his son, and his son loves the heck out of him. It's as if the forced separation is pathological. All the scenes between the father and son are golden. I did think that whenever the film strayed from them it wasn't as strong, and the pacing feels a little weird at times (almost certainly from the editing the film suffered later on). The final moments are killer.

Another sober wartime drama, this time a sort of reworking of THE ONLY SON as a widower schoolteacher decides to send his boy to a boarding school to give him the best education possible and seek a higher paying position to afford tuition. The film takes a sudden leap forward in time as the grown son desires to take care of his aging father, but the father forbids the son to compromise his own career. The war is barely mentioned but the film can easily be read as a propagandistic statement about self-sacrifice and devotion to duty, even at the cost of family unity. However, the pensive, tentative mood Ozu captures at the end, embodied in the son's distant, troubled look as he thinks about his father, hints at Ozu's own reservations with the moral message being issued. The scenes of father and son together in both halves of the story have a gentle perfection that gives the film all the beauty it requires, thanks to great performances by Shuji Sano as the grown son and Chishyu Ryo as the father. Amazingly, Ryu was only 38 when he gave this totally believable performance as an aging patriarch -- in fact he barely looks any different than he does in AN AUTUMN AFTERNOON twenty years later!

In this Japanese drama from Shochiku and director Yasujiro Ozu, Mr. Horikawa (Chishu Ryu) is a respected school teacher who is raising his young son Ryohei (Haruhiko Tsuda) alone, after the death of Horikawa's wife. A tragedy causes Horikawa to resign his position and move to the country. As his son grows and needs better schooling, Horikawa makes the difficult decision to move to the city for better paying work. The father and son then spend the next decade or more barely seeing one another, as the grown son (Shuji Sano) attends university and then begins work in another city.

This was made under the strictest conditions during wartime, when all films were required to have some element of propaganda that helped the war effort. Ozu gets by with having the father's sacrifice for his son's greater good work as a lesson to the Japanese populace to sacrifice for their country. It's there if you want to see it, but one could just as easily watch the film and not notice any propaganda. Ryu is terrific in his subdued way, his gently smiling man of simple virtue a living embodiment of the Ozu cinematic aesthetic.

I was struck with how often Ozu uses shots of large, foreboding architecture, such as artless multi-story office buildings or smokestacks or harsh concrete bridge pilings, and juxtaposes these images with scenes of common familial love and warmth, as if to say that family life is the one antidote to the cold modern world. Ozu's movies aren't for everyone, and I would completely understand people finding them boring and pointless. But to me their Zen, regimented tranquility and deceptive simplicity are among the finest in world cinema. Recommended.