Il était un père

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!

One more step in Ozu's long journey of trying to balance between a cinematic eye that sees with clarity into the disasters of dramatic life and reflections of that eye, his most famous films still ahead of him. French and Soviet silent filmmakers innovated in the 20's by looking to see the seeing eye in action, shaping, morphing world with vision. Ozu introduced something altogether different: non-mind, nothingness between eye and world.

This was a completely novel thing at the time in terms of cinema - although it's supported by a rich Buddhist tradition.

Even Ozu seemed unsure how to handle it. Cultivating this took him time. It is possible for example, that being a young Japanese cinephile fascinated with modern Western culture, he thought for a time that he was only reworking Chaplin, a visual story, pared down to essentials. He dabbled for a time with a fluid camera, after Sternberg. He did a chamber drama, controlled, stagebound environment, very German.

But at some point, he must have suspected this had potential to go much deeper than anyone had envisioned at the time. I believe the key transition was Dragnet Girl from '33: a gangster film, very upbeat and jazzy, pure Sternberg razzle-dazzle, that is until the finale, where the modern movie night of danger and intrigue gave way to the clarity and stillness of the first morning light.

This was great. He had discovered the eye, a landscape painter's eye, but not yet the right landscape. He spent the next couple of films looking. It should be life, he knew this much, but what kind of life?

Now this. The story is about a teacher scarred by an accident he couldn't prevent, and efforts of his surrounding world to extricate him from the exile of self-imposed guilt. He sends his son away, to study, work hard and advance himself. He keeps himself away, somewhere in Tokyo, and only periodically surfaces back from we presume a frugal existence. At a class reunion with his former pupils, he is reminded, urged to consider, that the world is moving ahead, still turning. All his pupils are grown men, married, most of them with kids.

So what a change from earlier fathers Ozu portrayed, often itinerant bums, a source of dismay or embarrassment for their kids. Here's a father who is hardened, by his own failures no less, resolute, preaching to his son that "work should be considered every man's mission" and to "serve your country".

There is of course the obvious comment to be made about wartime allegory and the call for patriotic action, by itself not very interesting. Sons of Japan urged forward by a strict but well-meaning father. Incidentally, that same year was when tides of war started turning in the Pacific, blowing back towards Tokyo and destruction.

But there is more here, for the first time. Now if we only listen to the story, the father is a tragic hero and a model to emulate. The dutiful son goes away in the finale, presumably to strive to fulfil his father's wishes. The parting image is one of many poignantly still shots.

So far Ozu had favored dramatic resolution of that stillness - Floating Weeds, Tokyo Inn - and at first glance this is no different. But these images reveal a more complicated world beneath the story.

Consider the plot again. The traumatizing event occurs because the father is not there to see. This is understandable; we cannot keep the whole world in check. It turns independent of us, transient, impermanent flow. The event also happens away from our sight, but in place of it we have a perspective the father lacks. At the crucial moment, Ozu cuts away to a shot of an ornamental stone top on a vertical post of a bridge. Now images of bridges feature prominently in Japanese iconography, signifiers among other things of what the Buddhist understand as the floating world. Distances in old Japan were traditionally measured from the great Nihonbashi bridge, the center of a symbolic axis mundi.

There is no motion from this point of stillness in our film, although we know a plot is being set in motion in the flow of transient waters below, a life being lost.

How does the father handle this? Distraught from the tragedy, he takes off with his son on a train. Not having made his peace with the fact, he later removes himself from sight of his son, who needs him more than anything else. And how does the son? He becomes the father he's been effectively deprived of, this broken man infused with values from that loss. In the finale he sails off into the night, onboard another train.

Trains; man-made, mechanical structures of life, human karmas in motion.

On the other hand, an immovable spot above the waters, clarity, dispassion, centered vision.

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.

Slow-moving tale of a father's relation to his son. After a pupil accidentally dies on an excursion, a teacher (Chishu Ryu) retires from services and starts working second rate jobs to provide for his son's education. The movie jumps many years to show the relation of the father and son as the son has come adult. It is a film about sacrifice and duty. The two main characters must live a life apart, given that the son has so fulfill his studying duties and the father is working elsewhere. There are some heartthrob scenes with the small boy and a gentle Ozu melancholy throughout, but I find it not to have very much going for it in terms of theme display or drama compared to other Ozu I have seen, with basically just the two characters. Still, effective film-making on very simple premises. Excellent score – I thought the composer must have been Ozu regular, but was not.

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.