Mi sono laureato, ma...

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.

An early Ozu short about a young graduate who can't bring himself to accept a low-on-the-food-chain position at an office because he feels he's overqualified; and the consequences of that decision.

Very bittersweet stuff, with a great ending that's happy, but not unabashedly happy. Like a lot of later Ozu works, 'I Graduated, But...' is a humble, down-to-earth story about ordinary people and its joy comes from their minor (meaningless in the great scheme) triumphs.

Especially noteworthy are a couple of shots of the main character at the bar, filmed from table height and incredibly striking, a Harold Lloyd poster that shows up in the background several times, and the conflict between tradition and modernity illustrated by the film's second-to-last shot of a moving train.

'I Graduated, But...' is recommended to Ozu fans and to fans of silent cinema in general.

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 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.

A college graduate is unable to find a job but tries to hide his unemployment from his wife and fiancee. Though only 11 minutes of fragments is all that remains of Ozu's initial entry in the "I Verbed, But..." series, it still plays rather coherently.