Yasujiro Ozu Special: The Only Son (1936)/An Autumn Afternoon (1962)

A couple of weeks back, I was lucky enough to catch a mini Ozu retrospective at the Filmothéque du Quartier Latin, one of Paris’ many terrific little arthouse cinemas in the district around the Sorbonne. Even better, alongside two of Ozu’s best-known films - Tokyo Story and An Autumn Afternoon -the management had decided to include one of the director’s lesser-known works: his first talkie, The Only Son. Having seen Tokyo Story fairly recently, I skipped it this time round to focus on the other films in the series, which I was watching for the first time, and in doing so gained a fresh appreciation of an auteur who only seems to get better with age. Nonetheless, although one of Ozu’s hallmarks is the consistency and continuity which links all of his films together, by juxtaposing his first talking picture and his last we can clearly see that a journey of tremendous aesthetic and an emotional refinement separates the early effort and the final masterpiece.

Like many Japanese directors, Ozu was late to the sound game (Japan’s unique approach to silent movies, employing skilled professional narrators in cinema auditoriums, meant they remained the norm even after silent movies had been definitively driven out of Hollywood), and his first talkie dates from 1936. The story is a simple one, and will appear familiar to any Ozu fan: a poor factory worker (Tsune, played by Chouko Iida) sacrifices everything to put her only child, Ryosuke, through school, only to discover that as an adult (played now by Shinichi Himori) he has not become the great man they had both hoped he would be, but merely another struggling face in the crowd. His life in Tokyo, while an improvement on the hardscrabble rural existence of his mother, is nonetheless dissatisfying to them both, and the film ends on with a beautifully bittersweet grace note, as Tsune manages to conceal her disappointment from everybody but herself.

It’s a fine film from a director with a remarkably consistent artistic vision. But to be honest, it’s an early talkie and the cracks show. The nuance Ozu had mastered in his silent features is far less apparent when it is married to rather leaden dialogue, as it is here. The themes – sacrifice, familial duty, the disappointment of failed aspirations -  are ones that Ozu would return to time and time again with great success, but here they have all the subtlety of an anti-Semitic woodcut. The characters retain a baseline amount of sympathy because of Iida’s solid performance as the self-sacrificing matriarch whose expressions and intonations say more than she could ever permit herself to put into words, while Himori fails to leave a strong impression as the titular son. His unwavering grin throughout his initial scenes with his mother is unnerving and his delivery is stilted,  although later scenes display far more nuance and range (which is fortunate, as Himori would go on to enjoy a long career, appearing in Ikiru and There Was A Father). The film also boasts an early role for Chishu Ryu, whose natural presence and charisma immediately make him the most interesting character despite his relatively small role in the action, as a former teacher of Ryosuke’s also fallen upon hard times in the city.

While there are some wonderful individual moments and arresting images (I’m thinking particularly of the shot where we see young Ryosuke’s legs from behind, through the staircase on which he is sitting), the most interesting aspect of The Only Son is the way in which it gives a foretaste of what was to come in Ozu’s work. An unusually blunt treatment from a director who treasured ambivalence, it nonetheless helps us trace the roots of some of the classic Ozu archetypes and commonplaces back to the beginning of his career as an auteur.

If The Only Son reveals moments of clumsiness and a tendency towards heavy-handedness in the young Ozu’s work, An Autumn Afternoon is truly at the other end of the spectrum. There could be no more fitting final film for Ozu – not only because it deals with aging and transition, but because it represents the pinnacle of the director’s achievement, reaching such simultaneous heights of both storytelling and artistry that it’s hard to see where he could have gone from here.

Chishu Ryu takes the lead here as he did in Late Spring, Ozu’s earlier take on the same theme - that of a widowed father trying to secure a marriage for his dutiful daughter, afraid that her devotion to him will cause her to miss out on starting her own family. This can be viewed either as a philosophical shift from the high worth placed on total self-sacrifice in The Only Son, with the father instead pushing for his daughter to lay aside her familial obligations and pursue her own happiness, or an intensification of the doctrine of self-sacrifice –Michiko resists her father’s attempts to marry her off, but finally concedes when he makes it clear that this is what he truly wants for her. Her pensive expression before her wedding leaves us with the unanswered question of who has made the greater sacrifice, the father or the daughter.

It’s astounding to see the sheer scope of the changes wrought on Japanese society as captured by Ozu’s camera across over 30 years. The stark black and white of his earlier output seemed to mesh perfectly with the simple, orderly existence of the characters it portrayed, whose way of life did not seem much different from that of their distant ancestors. In An Autumn Afternoon, however, we are treated to a rich palette of vivid 1960s reds and oranges and muted blues and greys. Not only is the result aesthetically arresting, but it also tells us that we are in a New Japan of hamburgers, fancy vacuums cleaners and Dick van Dyke sweaters. The main subplot, that of Michiko’s older brother and the conflict between his pretence to a bourgeois lifestyle and his wife’s practicality (represented by a coveted set of golf clubs), further enhances the portrait of a country dealing with the aftermath of massive post-war social, political and economic upheaval. 

As Ozu beautifully demonstrates, the process of transition from the old to the new often leaves the people undergoing it feeling adrift, their belief in the old ways shaken but their faith in the new unsure and tentative - ultimately, they must rely on their own hearts and minds to negotiate a morally and emotionally complex landscape. It is an observation made and revisited throughout his artistic output, but here, in his final film, it couldn’t be made with greater subtlety, beauty and poignancy.