• お早う (Good Morning)

12/19/21 (Sun)

Ozu’s 1959 film was supposed to be a remake of his 1932 silent classic I Was Born, But…, but the only resemblance was the presence of two young brothers rebelling against their parents (hunger strike in earlier film vs. vow of silence here). One of the last films he ever made, it still feels fresh and fun.

Ozu has ways of making films about nothing in particular that are immensely satisfying. The main conflict here is when the kids get reprimanded by the father for complaining and decide to take their revenge by refusing to talk – not just at home but to the neighbors, in school and elsewhere. The neighbors take this as arrogance and spread rumors that the mother has ordered them to ignore everyone due to an earlier misunderstanding. All turns out well, and the kids finally get the television they’ve been wanting as the parents accept that the expectations of their children, raised without worry of the basic needs, will be different from their own when they were growing up. Ultimately we see the kids’ English tutor (Sada Keiji) on the station platform shyly talking about the weather with their pretty young aunt (Kuga Yoshiko), still unable to express his feelings for her candidly.

Unfounded gossip is another theme here as neighbors first speculate that the head of the local housewife’s association has used their dues to buy a washing machine; then that the treasurer is taking out a grudge on the association head for falsely accusing her (neither of which was true); and that the couple who own the television where kids gather is not altogether respectable. The father resists buying a television, still a newfangled item in those days, saying that it will create 100 million idiots. In hindsight, he turns out to have been right.

Flatulence, so to speak, plays a big role in the film. Kids press each other’s foreheads to make themselves fart, the sound of which is more a cute musical note than the real thing. One constantly farting father has a lower tone (his wife keeps thinking mistakenly that he’s calling her), and one boy can’t seem to fart without squeezing out more than he wanted (the film’s final shot is his underwear hanging on the laundry line). If sound added anything over the silent version, it was this.

The title comes from an argument by the kids that adults say meaningless things all the time, like “good morning” and “nice weather today”; the younger child has adopted the English “I love you” as his greeting, which works just as well as anything else. Sada says that such phrases are necessary as social lubricant, but his mother tells him it’s time to start using more important words, especially to the not-so-secret object of his affection. And it’s true that most of the complications in the film come from not talking straightforwardly, causing people to misconstrue situations that could have been easily resolved. The kids’ silence makes the parents realize that they really haven’t been listening all along.

This is a wonderful depiction of life in late-1950s Japan, where doors are unlocked, neighbors in tightly knit communities share, borrow and lend, and kids gather freely in a rare home with a television to watch sumo. When a retired neighbor manages to get a door-to-door sales job, the families buy something from him to help him out. All are struggling, but no one is direly poor. People do express a desire to move out of the neighborhood, but as one character notes, anywhere they go will have neighbors. For all the gossip and marital arguments and kid troubles, it’s the humor that stands out. My favorite was the Crocodile Dundee scene where a traveling salesman wields a pocketknife to sharpen his pencils in a subtle attempt at intimidation, only to be confronted by a housewife who brings out a huge carving knife that she wields just as suggestively, prompting him to make a quick exit.

Ozu’s careful framing using colorful horizontals makes the scenes look at times like a painting. The stellar cast includes Sugimura Haruko, Chishu Ryu, Miyake Kuniko, Miyoshi Eiko and others. Special kudos to the two boys, who, as usual for Ozu’s work with kids, barely seemed to be acting. The younger kid, who clearly adores his much bigger brother, was especially appealing. A wonderful production that makes its point subtly and gently.