Film Review
Yasujirô Ozu wrote the first script for
There Was a Father in 1937, shortly
after completing work on
The Only Son (1936), with which
it shares many similarities, notably its heartrending account of the
separation of a child and a self-sacrificing parent. Ozu was
unable to make the film at the time as he was conscripted into the
Japanese Army in September 1937 and spent the next two years stationed
in occupied China. On his return to Shôchiku studio in
1939, Ozu immediately began writing the script for
The Flavor of Green Tea over Rice,
but refused to make the film as he disagreed with several changes
required by the military censors. It was only after
The Brothers and Sisters of the Toda Family
(1941), his first significant commercial success, that Ozu was minded
to return to
There Was a Father,
although the script went through a substantial revision before it went
into production.
There Was a Father was the
closest that Ozu ever got to making a wartime propaganda film, although
its explicit propaganda content (a few patriotic songs) is minimal and
ended up being excised (and destroyed) by the US army censor after
WWII. What we have now is probably nearer to the film that Ozu,
left to his own devices, would have made - a home drama that pays lip
service to the military leaders' expectations with its emphasis on duty
and manly self-restraint, but one that never lets us forget the
incredible human cost that inevitably goes with such noble
self-sacrifice.
The Brothers
and Sisters of the Toda Family and
There Was a Father were the only
two films that Ozu completed during the Asia-Pacific War and whilst
neither strictly counts as a propaganda film both were favoured by the
military and were seen to promote wholesome Japanese values, filial
devotion being read as a metaphor for diehard patriotism.
Ozu seldom took elements from his own life and plugged these directly
into his film, but there is an unmistakable autobiographical component
to
There Was a Father, which
adds to its uniqueness. Like the son depicted in the film, Ozu
was separated from his father at an early age and attended school in
his father's hometown (Matsusaka in Mie Prefecture) whilst his father
was away in Tokyo, earning money to support his family. For the
next ten years, Ozu hardly saw his father and was reared by his mother. The father-son
relationship figures strongly in a number of Ozu films but nowhere is
it explored with such depth, eloquence and heart-aching sincerity as in
There Was a Father, one of the
director's most personal and most powerfully moving films.
Picking up from where he left off in
The
Brothers and Sisters of the Toda Family, Ozu takes the theme of
filial duty and develops it further, in a way that appears to lend its
weight to 'national policy' but which in fact seems to caution against
blind devotion to an ideal. It is an abject sense of guilt, not
paternalistic ideology, that compels the father, Horikawa, to act as he
does, first giving up his job and then separating from his son in what
he believes is the best interests of his son. The demands he
places on his son, Ryohei, are well-meaning but appear heartlessly
misguided and Ozu makes no attempt to conceal the misery that Ryohei
experiences as a result of his father's stubbornness, first as a little
boy, then as a young man. Horikawa reprimands his son for crying,
but at the same time we feel his own anguish, revealed to us with
sublime subtlety through a remarkably controlled performance from Ozu's
finest actor, Chishû Ryû.
There Was a Father may be a
film in which Ozu tackles some of his favourite themes, with as much
delicacy and compassion as anything else in his oeuvre, yet
it somehow stands apart. Far darker in tone than much of Ozu's other work
and rendered ambiguous by the circumstances under which the film was
made, it is permeated by an almost overwhelming sense of remorse, which
can be interpreted both as disillusionment with Japan's expansionist
ambitions of the 1940s (which would involve the sacrifice of a
generation of young men) and Ozu's personal regret for not having been
able to become better acquainted with his own father. In the
film's closing sequences, Ozu quietly subverts the 'duty before all'
message that he hammers home in previous scenes by showing the damage
such stubborn high-mindedness can lead to - a son lamenting the father
he never knew and a heart broken beyond repair.
© James Travers 2013
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Next Yasujirô Ozu film:
A Hen in the Wind (1948)