The Only Son & There Was a Father

The Only Son & There Was a Father: Two Films by Yasujiro Ozu

The Only Son, Ozu's first sound film, is both a departure from his silent "college" comedies and a harbinger of things to come for the former teacher and onetime lover of Occidental film conventions. The director's atypical, sometimes discordant stylistics, which ultimately amounted to an abnegation of generally assumed cinematic tropes – pans, dollies, the 180-degree rule – are nowhere in evidence in this gloomy melodrama that prefigures the emergence of Japan's loved/loathed "salarymen" of postwar renown. This is Ozu in transition and very much a product and reflection of the equally transitional, prewar Japan. He's not yet the fully formed and celebrated filmmaker who would direct 1953's emotionally incendiary Tokyo Story nor the quietly contemplative man behind the seasonal meditations Early Spring, Late Autumn, and others. (The Only Son was a critical favorite at the time of its release but, tellingly, tanked spectacularly at the box office.) Still, proto-Ozu is awash in the themes of parentage, familial disappointment, and the socially inconvenient grind of modern life on the traditions of prior generations.

It's 1923 and middle-aged widow Tsune Nonomiya (Choko Iida) spends her days toiling behind a monstrously lovely automated loom in a rural Japanese silk factory, a sweatshop shot in exacting detail (columns of steam pour from the workers' machinated stations like floating columns of regret) by director of photography Shojiro Sugimoto. Her adolescent son, Ryosuke (Masao Hayama), has been recommended by his professor as a likely candidate for advanced studies, a fact which, as ever, thrills his mother, who dutifully scrapes up what little tuition she can afford by selling her house and packs the boy off to Tokyo. Thirteen years later, she visits the now-grown Ryosuke (Ozu regular Shinichi Himori) and discovers not only that was her sacrifice in vain – he's lost his profitable job with the city and become, of all things, a lowly teacher (echoing Ozu's early years) – but also that her son has married a stranger and fathered a child, all of it occurring in what amounts to a ramshackle Tokyo slum. The mother's dreams of a better life for her offspring are not only deferred but ultimately completely obliterated via Ryosuke's doleful march into mediocrity. Ozu's grim realism ends on an even glummer note as the mother returns to her job at the dank, depressing silk factory, which by this point feels like something David Lynch left on Eraserhead's cutting room floor, and proceeds to weave a blanket of maternal prevarications about her boy's (nonexistent) success. All is woe.

1942's There Was a Father is marginally less bleak, but only just. Widowed teacher Shuhei (Chishu Ryu) is father to young Ryohei (Haruhiko Tsugawa). Shuhei's life is briefly turned upside down when a student in his care drowns during a class outing (Ozu's depiction of the death and its repercussions is a template for the director's later aesthetic serenity). Familial sacrifice again enters the story when Shuhei forsakes his teaching career for a job in Tokyo, the better to send Ryohei to the best schools. Deviating from The Only Son's downward trajectory, the boy graduates and appears to be on his way to becoming a success, though university life necessitates a parting of the traditional family ways. Ozu's camera is often stationary here, focusing on emotionally pregnant silences or still lifes that eloquently comment on the action (or lack thereof). It's vintage Ozu, and it clearly prefigures the director's later ambivalence toward the Western film playbook. Duty and sacrifice are the order of the day, all of it shot in crisp, unflinching compositions by Yuharu Atsuta, who would go on to lens most of Ozu's most affecting postwar films.