Film Review
With his jaunty college comedies behind him, Yasujirô Ozu turned
his attention to the tribulations of the working poor and that mainstay
of Japanese society, the family. Ozu's own experience of family
life as a child had been far from idyllic, and for much of his
childhood (from the age of ten) he was separated from his father.
He never married and lived the life of a contented bachelor, and so it
seems peculiar that family life should be the thing that most
preoccupied him in his professional life. In many of Ozu's films,
particularly in the first half of his career, the families he portrays
are far from ideal, in some cases downright dysfunctional, with
relations between parents and their offspring stretched almost to
breaking point.
Passing Fancy
(a.k.a.
Dekigokoro) is a case
in point, a film that focuses on what was for Ozu the most problematic
of relationships, that of a father and his son.
The father-son relationship is rarely a thing of harmony in Ozu's
films, and the ambivalence of the director's own relationship to his
father can be felt in each of these films.
I Was Born, But... (1932),
A Story of Floating Weeds
(1934) and
There Was a Father (1942),
along with
Passing Fancy,
offer variations on a similar theme - a father's inability to live up
to his son's expectations and the gulf that inevitably ensues. Of
these four films,
Passing Fancy
is perhaps the most optimistic, as the film ends with the father being
unable to accept being separated from his son, preferring a future of
self-inflicted hardship and humiliation to the prospect of losing the
one thing that matters to him. But even in this film, which is
much lighter in tone than much of Ozu's work from this time onwards,
the strained nature of the relationship between father and son is more
than evident. Even though he is barely ten years old, little
Tomio already despises his father for being a drunken, uneducated
slob. The father, Kihachi, is fully aware of his son's contempt
for him, but seems unwilling to change, and shows a total lack of
parental responsibility, using his son as a punch-bag one minute,
spoiling him rotten the next.
Passing Fancy was the 30th
film that Ozu completed and already the director seems to have reached
the threshold of his mature phase. Most of the stylistic touches
that we associate with Ozu are in place - the low camera angles, the
placing of inanimate objects in the foreground and the use of pillow
shots (the juxtaposition of water towers and clotheslines suggests a
country that is still torn between its feudal past and industrialised
future) to punctuate the narrative - and the meticulous shot
composition and editing reveal a director who has mastered his
art. This film won Ozu the Kinema Junpo Award for best film, the
second time he won the award, and marks a clear departure from his
earlier work, which is more visibly influenced by American
cinema. That said, it is worth noting that the plot of
Passing Fancy owes a great deal to
King Vidor's
The Champ (1931)
and John Ford's
Three Bad Men
(1926), and Ozu continues to credit himself as a screenwriter under the
(westernised) pseudonym James Maki.
Passing Fancy exhibits the
diptych structure that is a quirk of most of Ozu's silent films, a
dramatic second half following a comedic first half (confirming
Chaplin's assertion that comedy is merely tragedy viewed from a
distance). The film begins with Kihachi, a middle-aged widower,
humorously attempting to rejuvenate himself as he goes chasing after a
pretty woman who is young enough to be his daughter. When Kihachi
realises the futility of this amorous escapade, the dramatic focus
shifts to the relationship between the father and son, and this is
where the tone of the film suddenly changes. Unable to endure his
son's rejection of him after the collapse of his romantic dreams,
Kihachi lunges out at his little boy. It is one of the most
shocking moments in Ozu's oeuvre, but what is even more surprising is
what follows. Shamed by his brutality, the father sinks into
pathetic immobility and allows his son to pummel him, paying him back,
blow for blow. The sight of a broken-down father realising that
he can never gain his son's love is unbearably poignant.
What makes this sequence (and the film in general) so powerful are the
remarkable performances from the actors playing the forever estranged
father and son, Takeshi Sakamoto and Tomio Aoki. Sakamoto
was one of Ozu's favourite actors and appeared in seventeen of his
films, including four in which he played a character named
Kihachi. Aoki had become an overnight star at the age of six
through his appearance in Ozu's hilarious comedy
A Straightforward Boy (1929)
and would also appear in many of the director's films, credited as
Tokkan Kozo (meaning 'boy who charges about'). Not only do
Sakamoto and Aoki both have an incredibly strong screen presence, they
are also exceptionally gifted actors, each capable of making us roar
with laughter and flooding our tear ducts, depending on whether Ozu is
in a comedic or tragic frame of mind.
One of the finest character actors in Japanese cinema, Takeshi Sakamoto
is at his best in Ozu's films, whether he is playing a boisterous
loveable rogue as in
Passing Fancy
or an inwardly tormented soul as in
A
Story of Floating Weeds. Habitually rude and abrasive on
screen, Aoki is a welcome antidote to all those dewy-eyed angelic kid
actors that are bred especially for American cinema - the energetic
brats he played for Ozu are far nearer to the kind of children we meet
in real life than almost anything to be found in Hollywood. But
whilst he has more than a touch of the demonic proto-psychopath about
him, the young Aoki never quite manages to conceal a child's
vulnerability, and he still manages to be adorable, despite his
gratuitous face pulling and the sadistic torture he inflicts on any
grown-ups who are unfortunate enough to get in his path...
© James Travers 2013
The above content is owned by filmsdefrance.com and must not be copied.
Next Yasujirô Ozu film:
Woman of Tokyo (1933)
Film Synopsis
Kihachi and Jiro are two brewery workers living in a slum district of
Tokyo. A widower, Kihachi has a young son, Tomio, who is ashamed
of his father for being poor and illiterate. One day, Kihachi
encounters a homeless young woman, Harue, and takes an instant liking
to her. He places her in the care of a woman friend, a restaurant
owner named Otome, and attempts to smarten himself up in the hope that
she will want to marry him. Otome advises Kihachi that Jiro would
make a far more suitable husband, but it soon becomes evident that Jiro
has no interest in Harue. After a violent argument with his son,
Kihachi tries to patch things up by giving him fifty sen. The
little boy promptly spends all of the money on sweets and ends up
dangerously ill with enteritis. Realising that Kihachi cannot
afford his son's medical treatment, Jiro borrows some money from a
barber friend, intending to pay back the loan by working as a labourer
in Hokkaido. When he hears of this, Kihachi takes Jiro's place on
the boat for Hokkaido, but has a last minute change of heart...
© James Travers
The above content is owned by filmsdefrance.com and must not be copied.