Compulsive Distance

A conscientious man leads a life of restraint, distancing himself from the son he cares for in Yasujiro Ozu's 1942 film There Was a Father (父ありき). The film has a lot in common with some of Ozu's later, better known films, particularly Late Spring, except it's about a father and son instead of a father and daughter. There's a great filmmaker in evidence throughout most of There Was a Father, particularly in the first thirty minutes, but it lacks the masterful subtlety in its climax seen in Late Spring.

Like Late Spring, There Was a Father stars Chishu Ryu as the father whose consciousness of social duty compels him to reject things he wants. The first part of the movie is unmistakably Ozu. Ryu plays a junior high school math teacher called Shuhei who accompanies his students on a school trip. When a boating accident causes one student to drown, we don't see the incident itself, just Shuhei and the other students rushing to the pier followed by a quiet, still shot of a capsized boat.

Ozu's instincts for showing moments around a traumatic incident instead of the incident itself were perfectly tuned to provoke the viewer's imagination. Footage of a capsizing boat and drowning student could never match what Ozu draws from our imagination.

It clearly wasn't Shuhei's fault and it's clear he's more conscientious than the average teacher. It's that very sense of responsibility, the very one that seems to make him an excellent caretaker, that compels him to resign and seek a career in which he does not have the responsibility of looking after other people's kids. He and his young son, Ryuhei, move back to Shuhei's hometown in Kanazawa while he figures out what to do.

Father and son are very close but, despite this, Shuhei decides his son should study in Ueda while Shuhei gets a job in Tokyo to pay for the school. Ozu jumps over years as smoothly as Orson Welles and we find ourselves, without title cards or special transitions, with an elderly Shuhei still in Tokyo while his twenty-five year old son has become a teacher in Akita.

Part of the reason this film doesn't work as well as Late Spring is that Shuji Sano as the son isn't nearly as effective as Setsuko Hara as the daughter. His smile always looks strained and fake and there's no sense of real affection between the father and son, a really crucial problem. The climax of the film also shows Ozu doesn't quite have the confidence yet to maintain the light touch that served him so well earlier in the film. But there's still plenty of great material here and Chishu Ryu gives a great performance as always. The story is another piece in Ozu's lifelong preoccupation to show the tragic flaws in Japanese social customs.

There Was a Father is available on The Criterion Channel.