Le fils unique

"The Only Son" is Ozu's first "talkie" - and utilizes sounds in an efficient, restrained manner to help tell the story with calm grace. The beautiful simplicity that pervades the piece is classical Ozu, and amplifies the poignant tale of a mother coming back to visit her son, after sacrificing her livelihood to ensure he achieves higher education. When she realizes that he is unsatisfied with his life as a night-school teacher, a general melancholic tone begins to unfold through the progression of the narrative. The ending is nicely done, and overall, the film is crafted in that spare, simple perfection that is the stylistic hallmark of Ozu's cinema.

In 1923, in the province of Shinshu, the widow and simple worker of a silk factory Tsune Nonomiya (O-Tsune) decides to send her only son to Tokyo for having a better education. Thirteen years later, she visits her son Ryosuke Nonomiya (Shinichi Himori), and finds that he is a poor and frustrated night-school teacher with a wife, Sugiko (Yoshiko Tsubouchi), and a baby boy.

"Hitori Musuko" is a poignant, heartbreaking, sensitive and beautiful movie about expectations, frustrations, revelations and hope in life. Once again the major concern of Ozu is with the family and human relationship. In "Hitori Musuko", Ozu brilliantly uses the sound, recent in 1936, in the end of the simple but touching story, when the machines in the factory stop working symbolizing the death of Tsune. I saw this movie in a Brazilian cable television in a copy that certainly needs restoration, and I regret to inform that only "Ohayô" has been released on DVD in Brazil. Only in festivals, and occasionally in cable television, Brazilians have the chance to see the work of this great director. Seeing the number of votes of this masterpiece in IMDb (only 88 votes), I believe that the distribution problem of this film might be international. My vote is ten.

Title (Brazil): "Filho Único" ("Only Son")

Of all the major directors in the world, Ozu was the last one to convert to sound; "The Only Son" was his first "all-talkie" film (in 1936), and it is remarkably inventive (technically) as well as deeply moving. Once again, his film deals with family dynamics: in this case, a widowed mother who has worked selflessly to provide her son with an education. But when she goes to visit him, she finds that he has not fulfilled his promise: he's stuck in a mediocre job, he has a wife and child and can't make any drastic changes because of his responsibilities. The ways that the mother and son try to reach an understanding, and their mutual resignation to the disappointments of life, create a glancing but powerful sense of that "quiet desperation" which was so often Ozu's theme.

It is a shame that this film is not available for wider viewing. I had the opportunity of seeing it at an Ozu retrospective in Cleveland. This film measures up to the other great classic Ozu films. The impact of Ozu's films works in much the same way as Japanese painting. There is great power in its open spaces and silences. They lend greater power to the words and emotions that are expressed. The dignity of the characters as they struggle with life is moving. Ozu is a master

of world cinema because he deals with themes of universal import and he does so with impeccable style. Especially noteworthy in this film is his effective use of music and sound. All in all, a very worthwhile experience

It's quite striking that although this film was made 17 years before Tokyo Story, all the aspects of the film-making style we have come to associate with Ozu are already fully present. But compare this film with, say, his "Sono yo no tsuma", made just six years earlier in 1930: in that film --- a rather slavish attempt to copy the style of German Realism -- none of the visual and narrative features he shows here are present.

No one has mentioned (so I will...) -- that the German film which Ryosuke takes his mother to see (in which she falls asleep, and of which he self-referentially says "this is what they call a talkie") is Willi Forst's 'Leise flehen meine Lieder' (Vienna, 1933), and the lovely blonde actress seen running through the wheatfields is Louise Ullrich. This film (now largely forgotten) was a popular sensation in Europe at the time, depicting the love affair between Franz Schubert and the Countess Eszterhazy. Also... noticeable in a few scenes in Ryosuke's house is a large travel poster which says 'Germany'. All of which shows the extent to which European film-making was in the mind of the young Ozu. We think of Ozu as a purely "domestic" Japanese director (in every sense of that word), but in fact he was well-versed in the traditions of western film-making.