Meninos de Tóquio

I saw this film at a special screening at the Museum Of Modern Art in New York City with live piano accompaniment. I'm not sure we needed the piano, this is a really great comedy about two young brothers trying to fit in in a new place. They are faced with two things: Bullies and that they feel their father is a nobody since he works for one of the other neighborhood boy's father. The two brothers are great. The audience, which was a refreshingly large one, laughed freely through the film, as I did.This is my first Ozu film, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. It depicts a child's world, what matters to them. It is a great silent film, the pace is good, it never drags. Not to be missed.

One of the very few silent films where you can hear the magic. Ozu directs I WAS BORN....BUT, the story of 2 brothers growing up in a small town Japan. Beautifully filmed with a wonderful, down to earth story of childhood joys and sorrows. Keep in mind, although sad, this was filmed in 1932. Just about every child in this film would grow up and fight (and most likely die) in World War 2. With this in mind, the film with hope and innocence. Still, knowing the possible future, you can't help but see the ending as somewhat sad.

An early family drama by Ozu that starts as a coming of age-`Japanese 400 blows'- and develops into a deep essay about identity, acceptation, self-respect, honor and exemplary. Ozu has a unique style for filming rituals, and these rituals are the dynamos of Tradition. In portraying a fractured relationship between a father and his sons, Ozu reflects on the transition between an old dying order and the arrival of a new one (both kids dream of being officials in the army, some ten years before Hiroshima). This works also as a metaphor of Japan on its way to technocracy, westernization and materialism, with its small bourgeois suburbia, the ever-passing trains and even home movies and child games where kids cross themselves in the Christian fashion. There's an unforgettable traveling shot with a choreography of yawns, some recognizable `Tatami' angles, and other technical achievements that prove that Ozu mastered his craft very early on (in fact, though silent, the film looks years ahead that many contemporary Hollywood productions). A rare film and indeed a very accessible one to the complexities of the cinema of Ozu.

This Ozu's early silent film was made when he was only 29, at a formative age, he has already acquired a keen eye on sieving the callous doctrine of the society's pecuniary pecking order through the lens of two kids' growing dismay and perplex.

Two school-age brothers Ryoichi (Sugawara) and Keiji (Aoki) are moving to suburbs with their parents, a shrewd move of their father Yoshi (Saitô, a virtuoso player jostle between primness and clownishness) to hobnob with his boss Iwasaki (Sakamoto). With a good salary, they can afford a better life here, but the boys have some difficulty to find their feet, especially when they are picked on by school bullies, led by a bigger kid (Iijima), they play truant and laze around, ask an older delivery boy (Kofujita) to forge teacher's signature, all child's play and they would be reprimanded by Yoshi when the lid is blown off. Nevertheless, Ozu applies a very gentle touch and a ludic attention in limning the boys' daily expediency to tackle with their problems (there are not enough sparrow's eggs in the world to beat their bully), and eventually the scale would be tipped when they are wise enough to crack the knack of how to succeed in becoming an alpha dog, even Taro (Katô), Iwasaki's son, has to pay deference to the boys' whims. (a children's game but so rapier-like in its connotation linked to the power struggle in the adult world.)

Then comes a blow, during a friends-gathering in Iwasaki's place, where films of daily vignettes are screened, a galling discovery would inflame the brothers' chutzpah to brazenly question their father's authority, "are you a successful person?", "why can't you be successful?", it is a blow to the brothers' unwitting but vaunted ego, which certainly doesn't tally with their young age, and is a corollary of a society spurred and indoctrinated by sheer competition and capitalism, even for kids, they are possessed with the idea of supremacy, power and hubris, which outstrips the parameter of childish mischief. In retrospect, the film grants us a gander into the frame-of-mind of a pre-WWII Japan, but not prescient enough to pinpoint a more perspicacious outlook, instead, an anodyne finale betrays Ozu's own perspective at that time.

The children in the film are well-trained scamps, endearing to watch, especially Tomio Aoki as the younger brother, transforms the disadvantage of his less photogenic looks into something archly expressive with all the gurning, imitating and feigning, a farceur is in the making. A minor grouch to Donald Sosin's persistent attendant score, a relentless cascade of tunefulness can certainly overstay its welcome. Anyhow, a lesser comedy branded with Ozu's name is still worth visiting, not the least for the sake of his masterful tutelage and coordination of his exuberant pupils in front of the camera.

This is remarkably gentle stuff, I felt completely exhilarated whilst watching, an intimate openness like being welcomed into someone's home on an afternoon. It helps that it's a silent, they were still making them in Japan by that time albeit usually with what was called a benshi narrating the whole, it abets the languid flow of childhood spring that permeates the whole thing.

It is cleverly structured, again a gentle touch but carefully applied; two brothers new on the block have to carve their own space while fending off a gang of bullies, this is mirrored in the adult world by having their father similarly have to struggle for advancement in the working place.

The extra layer is our insight into the beginnings of the Showa period; capitalist industrialization is intensified, Western styles increasingly applied over traditional mores. The adults are smartly dressed in suits, wear hats, smoke cigars. The family's house is situated on the side of railroad tracks, now and then trains come shooting off in the back of the frame, constant reminders of a modern life lunging forwards.

Again this is cleverly mirrored in the weave of the film itself, the specific image of the house by the tracks recalling La Roue, a French film that had spoken very clearly to the Japanese with its transient world of circular suffering. The whole carries hues of Chaplin's bittersweet whimsy, with a mobile camera derived from Sternberg, another favorite of early Japanese filmmakers. There is no benshi narrating this, just the intertitles, another Western norm.

Having just asserted power in their microcosm, the kids eventually discover that their father is a servile buffoon, a kind of court jester at the office; this revelation tearing down the facade of respectability the kids were looking up to, implicitly posits the whole working structure to be feudal, with the capitalist boss as just another kind of daimyo surrounded by fawning servants. This happens in a superb scene where everyone is gathered at the house of the boss to watch this newfangled thing called the movies. So it is the cinematic reflection that reveals truth, it was exciting to discover this moment of self-reference in a Japanese film of the time.

So even though Ozu's name usually brings to mind connotations of a purity distilled from tradition, this is breezy stuff, attuned with an emerging film culture abroad, explicitly modern in view and subject matter.

And knowing what we do now, there is biting commentary in the parting notion; asked what they want to do when they grow up, the two brothers very seriously assert that they want to be generals. The Japanese army had just invaded Manchuria the previous year.