Director: Yasujiro Ozu
Writers: Tadao Ikeda, Yasujiro Ozu, Takao Yanai
Photography: Yuharu Atsuta
Music: Kyoichi Saiki
Editor: Yoshiyasu Hamamura
Cast: Chishu Ryu, Shuji Sano, Haruhiko Tsuda, Mitsuko Mito, Shin Saburi
Criterion editions are often little masterpieces themselves of restoration, but even their print of this picture by director Yasujiro Ozu is badly damaged, suggesting the neglect it may have suffered since its Imperial Japan release date, when it was a modest success. Yet now it's almost as if that were the plan: the abrupt cuts, the missing time (seven missing minutes under the oversight of Douglas MacArthur), and the hissing audio, which sometimes drowns dialogue. They actually work to underline the poignant and affecting themes, which focus on loss, where the heart barely has speech. On one level it's a story of duty and well-meaning (and arguably necessary) neglect, but what is produced is a heartsick kid and man, a vivid and painful unrequited love that an only son feels for his father, who was widowed when the boy was still quite young.
It's like Fred MacMurray and My One Son and profoundly tragic. At the time of the movie the father, Shuhei Horikawa (the always impressive Chishu Ryu, one of Ozu's regular players), has apparently come to terms with his wife's death, but we see him take on even more baggage. As a strict but beloved schoolteacher, dubbed "the Badger" by students, he escorts his students on an annual field trip involving overnights. One year a student, disobeying his admonitions, takes a boat out rowing. It capsizes and the student drowns. Horikawa blames himself and retires from teaching. At first it gives him more time to spend with his son, but he soon realizes they must live apart. His career is now more itinerant and he believes, probably rightly, that stability is what's important for his son. He places the boy in a boarding school when he is not yet even 12. They will never live together again.
Both versions of the son, Ryohei—the boy (Haruhiko Tsuda) and the young man (Shuji Sano)—literally long for one thing alone, to live with the father again. It's almost a little weird with the grown man, though he is repentant and grateful in a scene where his father argues forcefully that it's the way things must be. As a wartime movie, Ozu obviously had to hit certain marks with Japanese censors, but they are remarkably light-handed (and/or mostly in the missing seven minutes). There is talk of service and duty, a suggestion that Ryohei may be or have been conscripted into the military (his day job, like his father's at one time, is a schoolteacher). In his rejection of Ryohei's overtures, Horikawa seems to argue that "duty" makes it impossible for them to live together.
It's easy to project contemporary views on all this. On the one hand, Ozu seems to be undermining the patriotic messages of duty and obligation, showing how Horikawa's moral principles might also be a way to avoid intimacy with his son, who perhaps reminds him more than he likes of his partner who has abandoned them both in death. It's equally likely that Ozu believes the duties of a father in many ways preclude friendship with a son. A father is called on to be a disciplinarian because he is the more mature and has parental responsibilities, which are doubled for Horikawa as the only parent. His embrace of accountability is all contained in his nickname, the Badger, as well as in the scenes involving the field trip and his decision to retire from teaching. Even his best friend thought it was a hasty and unfortunate decision.
But the emotional weight of this story, and it is imposing, is really all with Ryohei, who simply loves his father and loves being with him. If it's weird it's because it's so simple, where so many father-son relationships are complicated. Horikawa is a complicated person himself but his son is quite simple, and the little miracle of this picture is how well that is pulled off. Tsuda as the boy has decent instincts but his ability to move us is more a matter of direction, for example simply hanging his head when his father informs him of his decisions. Sano as the young man presents a figure somewhat more complicated, but more in the way that we take, say, Fred Rogers or Jonathan Richman, refusing to take the innocence at face value and persisting in seeing motives behind it.
Ryohei may or may not be a damaged person but the solace he takes simply being in the presence of his father somehow prevents him from ever being a grotesque. He is obedient to his father in all things, even marrying the woman his father selects for him. But the tragedy of parents and offspring in the natural order of things is that sons must see their fathers perish, and so it goes in this simple story of family dynamics. This story, if it is anything, is in the natural order of things. What is perhaps most remarkable here is that there is nothing at all remarkable here. That's why it tugs so hard.
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