A Crisis of Inconvenience

A carefree, wealthy family endures the minor discomforts of being suddenly less wealthy in 1941's Brothers and Sisters of the Toda Family (戸田家の兄妹). Directed by Yasujiro Ozu, I found myself reminded at times of his most famous film, Tokyo Story, made thirteen or so years later. Brothers and Sisters of the Toda Family has nothing to compare with the later film's impact but it has a few points of interest.

The first act of the film is the best. The patriarch of the large Toda family, Shintaro Toda (Hideo Fujino), suddenly has a heart attack following his 69th birthday party. The suspense is really effective after we get one shot of him rolling over in pain. Ozu's usual style of cutting from one low, still camera shot to another is perfectly complemented by the bewildered, sluggish response of the whole family.

Shintaro's wife (Ayako Katsuragi) shuffles to the door, tells a servant, who goes down the hall to where the youngest daughter, Setsuko (Mieko Takamine), decides to call the eldest brother, Shinichiro (Tatsuo Saito), who's a doctor. Cut to Shinichiro's home where he's enjoying a quiet conversation with his wife. Word is passed to him about the phone call and he wonders what could be the matter. All this time, the viewer is painfully aware of Shintaro in pain, receiving no assistance.

After his death, it turns out he'd been guarantor for a now bankrupt company so the surviving Toda family is on the hook for a lot of debt. They have to sell most of his assets and the two women who'd been living in his household, his wife and youngest daughter, are sort of left homeless. Only a small, run down, seaside property is left to them and it's considered too shabby for them to inhabit. So they go to live with first one sibling then another, in the hopes of killing time until Setsuko finds a husband. It's this that really reminded me of Tokyo Story, the focus on two awkward house-guests. There's even a scene of Setsuko and her mother trying to sleep while loud music plays in another room, a scene Ozu used again in Tokyo Story.

The film's conclusion is oddly mild, especially compared to the deep and powerful ending to Tokyo Story. The most interesting character in Brothers and Sisters of the Toda Family is the second eldest brother, Shojiro (Shin Saburi), who's introduced as being a little lazy and disrespectful, yet who turns out to be the one with his head on the straightest by the end. Knowledge of the future adds some extra tension to this film made in 1941--Shojiro has a job in Japanese occupied China which is implied to be stable or lucrative. So much for that.

Brothers and Sisters of the Toda Family is available on The Criterion Channel.

Twitter Sonnet #1661

With having shored the flour up she'd start.
A heavy room's required, hard to press.
But humid heat's a thought to soothe the smart.
Amidst the oven haze, she lost her dress.
A picture beach presides beside the home.
A salted breeze was warmer near the stove.
With little thought she drew a razor comb.
Her mind the whiles seeks a shaded grove.
A blossom pattern wove her apron first.
A trope of motes arranged a dance of light.
The morning pantry greets a breakfast burst.
By noon, her cooling pie's a wholesome sight.
Debated cakes were left too long outside.
She slowly sits and tries to now decide.

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.

The Noodles are Fine

Beneath the surface of even the most harmonious society we may find a fundamental truth of human existence; inevitable psychological isolation. This is deftly conveyed in Yasujiro Ozu's final film, 1962's An Autumn Afternoon (秋刀魚の味 "The Taste of Sanma"). The simple events in the life of one family and their friends are portrayed smoothly, with little apparent emotional pain, yet every scene also somehow makes plain the temporary, illusory nature of life's comforts, even as it acknowledges their beauty and necessity.

The ensemble story is more or less centred on Shuhei Hirayama, an older man played by Ozu regular Chishu Ryu. Ryu again brings his unique talent for conveying complete, calm, affability simultaneously with an undercurrent of gentle disappointment. We find him at a regular reunion with school chums at which they've invited one of their favourite teachers, a Chinese literature professor they've knicknamed "The Gourd" (Elijiro Tono). Amid the drunken discussion and laughter, the Gourd is the first to comment on how each person really spends life alone.

The course of his life may have brought him forcibly to this observation. Once a respected teacher, his financial difficulties have compelled him to open a cheap noodle shop in his old age which he runs with his daughter (Haruko Sugimura) who is herself now past a marriageable age.

Daisuke Kato has a small role as a man who wanders into the noodle shop and recognises Hirayama as his captain from the battleship he served on in World War II. Not realising the proprietor of the noodle shop is an old mentor of Hirayama's, Kato's character casually informs Hirayama that the food is terrible there and insists on buying him a meal elsewhere, an invitation courtesy compels Hirayama to accept. This bind enforced by custom is almost immediately contrasted with a trampling of custom when, in another bar, captain and former subordinate hear a familiar military tune on the radio and Kato's character stands to mock the way Japanese soldiers were once compelled to march and salute.

Hirayama amiably concedes it was probably a good thing Japan lost the war. Meanwhile, he starts to think about the welfare of his own daughter, Michiko (Shima Iwashita), who, at 24, is almost past the marriageable age, like the Gourd's daughter.

This is ground Ozu has already covered well in Late Spring with Chishu Ryu playing another man in a similar position. But in this case, he won't be left by himself because he also has a 21 year old son (Shin'ichiro Mikami) still living at home. But the film shows subtly but clearly how the three Hirayamas are isolated by their own needs and complex, sometimes suppressed, sometimes unexamined desires.

This might have made a good film if all this were conveyed with dramatic confrontations, yelling, and throwing of plates and lamps. But the film consists entirely of polite conversations and Kojun Saito's blissful, almost bossa nova score. It's not quite like the tightening constraints of a Naruse film. Ozu touches his subject so delicately that the impact gets deep under the skin in ways you might not even immediately realise until hours after the final frame. Ozu's greatest films, Late Spring and Tokyo Story, have climaxes with clear, devastating meaning. The meaning at the end of Autumn Afternoon is conveyed by a cross hatch of very innocent comments and circumstances. It's a beautiful reveal of reality's inadequacy.

An Autumn Afternoon is available on The Criterion Channel.