• 一人息子 (The Only Son), 2/12/23 (Sun)

Ozu’s 1936 film was his first talkie, but the sparse dialogue feels almost like an extension of his silent days. The film opens in 1923. A woman (a superb Iida Choko) in the rural town of Shinshu near Nagano is desperately poor working in a silk mill but is determined to sacrifice herself to put her child through middle school in order to ensure him a better life. The film flashes forward to 1935, when she decides to visit her son, now graduated and working in Tokyo as a civil servant. Arriving with expectations high, she discovers that he left the civil service a half year earlier and is now a low-paid teacher at a night school. She also learns to her surprise that he has a wife and child and leads a bare-thread life in a slum overlooking Tokyo’s garbage incinerators. They visit his mentor, who had been a highly regarded teacher back in Shinshu and one of the main reasons that the student pursued his studies and went to Tokyo. She is sad to see that he is now a struggling father of four running a meager tonkatsu restaurant.

The son does his best to entertain his mother, taking her to tourist spots like Asakusa and even to her first “talkie”, a German import that puts her to sleep. (A poster of a female film star, presumably German given the times, is one of the only decorations in the son’s home.) She feigns enjoyment, but he senses her disappointment. He finally admits to her that he is ashamed that she has found him this way after all she gave up and proclaims himself a failure. He confesses that he wishes he had never left the countryside. She gets angry and reminds him that she never gave up even at her lowest moments, telling him to pick himself up. Overhearing this, his wife, feeling bad that he can’t do more for his mother, secretly sells one of her last kimonos and slips him money to take the mother out.

Just when they are leaving, they learn that their neighbor’s child has been kicked by a horse and severely injured. He runs to help. Seeing the boy’s mother in despair at the hospital, he insists that she take the money that the wife passed him, saying that neighbors naturally have to watch out for each other. It makes his mother immensely proud to see him giving up the little he had for the sake of others, feeling that she has at least passed on a sense of decency. She tells him that this is the best gift she could have received.

After she leaves, we find that the mother has left a small bit of money for him, which spurs him to vow to go back to school and make something of himself. Meanwhile, she has returned to her menial factory job, where her colleague assumes from her spare answers that the Tokyo trip was just as imagined. In the film’s final line, the colleague tells her that she must be a happy woman, to which the woman smiles and nods. The woman then goes outside, sits, and cries.

It’s a beautiful film, though the mother, son and mentor are the only truly realized characters. Ozu has never been much on talk, but the spartan dialogue here is extreme. I would have thought, for instance, the mother would have made at least minimum small talk when she meets her daughter-in-law for the first time. That does give the limited dialogue greater weight, especially in the confrontation between the man and his mother. Ozu also lingers on odd objects and angles, including one exceedingly long shot of an unremarkable corner of the room with no one there and no sound whatsoever. I always wonder how he chooses these seemingly random shots; they don’t seem to have meaning in themselves and don’t really illuminate the story other than giving it atmosphere. It’s a technique he maintained to the end of his career.

The film opens with a quote from Akutagawa, “Life’s tragedy begins with the bond between parent and child” (more literally: “The first act of life’s tragedy begins when parent and child are formed”). This could be the opening for most Ozu works that I’ve seen, and it’s telling that here already in his very first talkie is his ever-present theme (carried over from his silent films) of parent-child relations. His spare style, the reticence of the characters, and the lack of high drama make his works more meditative and deeper felt than more dialogue-filled films.

Iida was especially effective in the final moments, when her insistence that she can finally die in peace after seeing her son married and happy is betrayed by her subsequent heartbreaking look outside the factory. (I thought of her similar devastating sadness at the end of Ozu’s silent Floating Weeds a few years earlier.) She was the backbone of the film. Himori Shinichi, an actor I wasn’t familiar with, was also excellent as the son. His delight in seeing his mother and his shame at her seeing his lifestyle both felt genuine. A young Ryu Chishu, already an Ozu veteran at this point, makes a strong contribution as the mentor who failed to make good, his acting approach already full realized at this early stage. It’s a lovely film about what we owe our parents and each other. The highly restrained feelings won’t be for everyone in this more expressive age, and attitudes toward women have evolved considerably. Still, a very fine film.