Fui Reprovado, Mas...

I'm in awe of Ozu, in case you haven't noticed yet. This particular film can be found on the "Student Comedies" set released by the BFI. It's very much influenced by Harold Lloyd, and it's magical.

Light years ahead of "Wakaki hi" (1929) that was released the year before, Ozu manages to capture here not only the intense emotional fluctuation of anticipation and disappointment and the student environment where these feelings are deeply rooted in pride and communal pressure to succeed.

While "Wakaki hi" (1929) has its darker, rawer moments, here Ozu extends this sense of loss quite dramatically. In fact, I sympathized with the main character to such an extent that most of the film was agonizing in the dread he was brooding in.

This, however, is Ozu's strength. There's brilliant comedy there, but it's the more brilliant because of his deep understanding of human emotion. The contrapuntal relation of the ebb and flow of laughter and sorrow flows naturally here and shows what a great filmmaking master Ozu was from the "begin-ning" (considering his earliest films are now lost).

Ozu's follow-up to I GRADUATED, BUT... actually plays somewhat like a prequel: a student fails when the shirt on which he wrote his exam cheat sheet gets mistakenly sent to the laundry. The student contemplates his outcast fate as his graduating dorm-mates all face the working world. The film is loaded with clever shifts in perspective (such as when a boy, misunderstanding the meaning of 'flunk' declares that he wants to flunk just like his big brother), and the film becomes a hilarious and touching reflection on college life and what it means to leave it.

Part of a series of films with the same title structure, and perhaps supposed to exist in the same universe as Days of Youth, I Flunked, But... is a nice, very short feature film that once again shows Ozu playing with both comedy and his favorite thematic approach to characters. It's slight, with not a whole lot to talk about, but it's also a nice 65-minutes.

Five friends at university have decided to cheat their way through their final exams. Their system for their multi-day exam is for one to cover the back of his shirt in text that the person behind him will copy when necessary and then pass the answers around any which way they can. This is introduced through the first day's attempt filled with the light comedy that Ozu had shown a penchant for (with obvious American influences from Chaplin and Keaton shining through), especially a moment where one of them attaches an answer onto their professor's back as he walks up and down the aisles, the intended recipient unable to get the paper or read.

The focus turns towards Takahashi (Tatsuo Saito) who gets chosen to wear his shirt the following day. He doesn't have to cover the shirt with answers, though. That task falls to another classmate (never given a name, but I think this is Chishu Ryu) whose efforts are the only efforts at studying in a rowdy night with another group of four friends. That there are two groups of four friends was lost on me for a while, not cleared up until much later in the film, by the way. Anyway, the plan goes sideways when, drunk off of merriment, Takahashi fails to notice the laundryman taking his shirt covered in writing away to be cleaned. He and his friends are toast.

Well, just the cheating friends. His other friends, the ones he partied with, are fine. These two separate groups are really my biggest issue with the film. The lack of clarity around it is an issue, but the film is simply too short for this mass of characters. It doesn't help that Ozu refuses to use intertitles for anything other than dialogue, the occasional note on the passage of time, and perhaps a haiku. I generally don't mind his limited use of intertitles, it shows a strong confidence in his filmmaking abilities, abilities that most of the time more than makeup for the limited ability to convey information explicitly with them, but it just doesn't help with clarifying things here.

I'm complaining too much because this confusion was actually not that much of a drawback. It's confusing when the grades come in as the two groups vie for spots to see the scroll of names and rankings in the class in the College of Economics, but it gets cleared up eventually when Takahashi's roommates gather to celebrate their graduation with Takahashi being treated like he died because he didn't while the other friends (given more screentime and having more discernably unique features to highlight them).

And we get to the actual focus of the film, much like Ozu's others, the aftermath of the major change, or lack of change here. Takahashi has to watch as his failure begins to define him, one group of friends casting off their student uniforms for business suits to go out in the world and find employment as men. With considerate help from his girlfriend (Kinuyo Tanaka), he gains some composure during her effort to give him his suit, and he decides to move on again, finding what to enjoy in life despite the setback. And that life is college life, returning to campus for another term to complete his studies, complete with cheering and fewer concerns about things like money.

So, it's a bit messier than expected with its large cast of characters, mostly undefined, squeezed into a short running time. It's not as visually impressive as Ozu's previous existing work (apparently filmed in a week). And it is an easy ending that celebrates a kind of arrested development rather than change into adulthood. However, it's got a good central character to carry us through things, nice little comedy to punch up nearly every scene, and the look at a man facing disappointment is actually quite compelling. On balance, I liked the film, though I found it a bit frustrating at the same time. It's the least of Ozu's output so far, but I still found it to be pretty good.

While being lesser known than much of his work, Ozu's early silent "I Flunked, But..." is still a work of the finest filmmaking craftsmanship. It is a beautifully told rendition of a simple tale, one that centers around a young man that flunks college...and that's sort of it. It portrays this young man in such a way that during his journey of ups and downs, the emotions are heightened to an unexpected degree. the story seems rather consequential in comparison to many of commercial cinema's epic terrorist-robot- dinosaur threats, but this mildly silly and largely simplistic is far more relatable, sympathetic, and, in the end, emotional thanks to Ozu's brilliant eye for cinema. Not only does his camera move and stare with grace, capturing the action with poignant artistry, but his script works as both a college comedy and a sorrowful melodrama. Despite its lack of any reputation whatsoever and clear state of obscurity, this film is better than you probably imagine, and anybody interested should see it as soon as they get their hands on a copy.

"I Flunked, But..." (Rakudai wa shita keredo) is an Ozu piece made in the 1930's, and a great example of what a Silent Film can do. A college satire set in Depression-era Japan, "I Flunked But.." is an excellent movie, a comic masterpiece, and perhaps one of the stronger examples of Ozu's silent film ouevre.

It concerns the humorous attempts made by Takahashi and his gang in trying to pass the rigourous "Exam Hell" mandated by the College of Economics they attend. We are introduced to a variety of very funny cheating techniques and the gang's dedication to perfecting odd gaits and struts. Takahasi and his cohorts fail the one important exam that enables them to graduate, when one of their valuable cheating tricks (a shirt cribbed with diagrams and notes) is taken out by the laundryman. This movie is filled with a bunch of comic miniutae as well, from Ozu's play with shadows (a noose shows up as a lamp's string after Takahasi fails the exam), superb dialogue (even though its a silent film - many lines are very good), some fairly memorable characters (one of Takahasi's dorm-mates, a bespectacled klutz, constantly thinks it absurd that he was able to graduate while Takahasi, his smart "teacher", fails), and some nice indoor cinematography in Ozu's classic style.

The film's ironic punchline comes in the harsh truth that during tough times, there are rarely any jobs, so the student who flunks is actually better off than the student who graduates. All of Takahashi's dorm-mates get rejected one job after the other and reminisce of the "good college days" - one of the most memorable lines is when one of the characters say: "I want to go back to college - we graduated too hastily". The film may be a hard find, being that its silent and B&W, (and it was made in 1930!) but if you can catch it, it's definitely worth it. I was able to watch it at Berkeley's Pacific Film Archive - while a musician, Joel Adlen, played the score in the background on piano. Definitely a small fraction of the overall aesthetic greatness of Ozu as a director and an artist.