The Only Son (Hitori musuko)
|  Yasujiro Ozu started directing films in the late 1920s and had made more than 30 of them in virtually every popular genre (although mostly comedies influenced by Harold Lloyd and Ernst Lubitsch) before he made his first “talkie,” The Only Son (Hitori musuko), which was originally planned to be a silent film. Ever the stubborn artist, Ozu was the last of his contemporaries, which included Kenji Mizoguchi, Hiroshi Shimizu, and Mikio Naruse, to convert to synchronized sound, and The Only Son looks only minutely different from his silent productions; in fact, the film could have been just as effective and moving with intertitles instead of spoken dialogue. In terms of Ozu’s development as an artist, The Only Son is a crucial stepping stone toward the kind of carefully composed, intimate family dramas for which he would become known. He had already directed several such films, including I Was Born, But ... (1932) and A Story of Floating Weeds (1934)--both of which he would remake later in his career with synchronized sound and color--but The Only Son marks the full fruition of that style.Like most of Ozu’s family dramas, The Only Son has a simple plot built on generational tensions whose narrative surface is but a thin mask for much deeper issues and themes. The main character is a hard-working widow named Tsune (Chôko Iida) who sacrifices her own financial security to put her son Ryosuke (Masao Hayama) through school, partially due to the child’s own desire to continue his schooling (mainly because his friends are) and partially because the boy’s teacher (Chishu Ryu), an ambitious young man full of dreams and promise, tells her that her son will have no future without a proper education. This portion of the film takes place in 1923, when Japan was rapidly developing as a modern nation, having broken free from its feudal past at the end of the 19th century. For the teacher (and, eventually, Ryosuke), Tokyo--the gleaming urban symbol of Japan’s entry into modernity--is the place to be, not Shinshu, the small, poor, rural community in which Tsune works at a textile mill. The film then jumps forward to find Ryosuke (Shinichi Himori) a young man living in Tokyo and earning a living as a night-school teacher, a profession that, despite being intellectual rather than manual labor, commands very little respect and pays even less (by the mid-1930s, Japan was in a serious economic depression and was moving into a sense of violent nationalism, emperor worship, and empire-building, none of which is explicitly mentioned here, but certainly shaped the Japanese audience’s reception of it). He has a wife (Yoshiko Tsubouchi) and a newborn son, but he feels that he has not fulfilled his promise, especially given the sacrifices his mother made to get him the education that would supposedly ensure his future. When his mother arrives for a surprise visit, he tries to put on a good show and pretend to be more successful than he is, but ultimately the façade breaks down and he must admit that all of her hard work may very well have not paid off, at least in terms of social and economic status (in this regard, the film is a dramatic extension of Ozu’s “college comedies,” which were built on the same idea that hard work and education don’t always pay off like we’re told). The film’s most poignant and strangely beautiful sequence finds mother and son sitting in a field and talking with the smokestacks of a garbage incinerator belching in the background: Their frank conversation is a crucial moment in the film’s emotional development, while its setting emphasizes the disparity between dreams of Tokyo as a prosperous, urban dreamscape and its realities. The Only Son was shot in Ozu’s then nascent characteristic style of low camera angles, static shots (like his 1953 masterpiece Tokyo Story, a film to which it seems to be building, The Only Son features exactly one tracking shot), and a poetic use of “pillow shots” between scenes, all of which creates a contemplative mood that emphasizes the intimacy of the storytelling and the importance of character interactions (Stanley Kauffman called it “a promise of perfections to come”). From a narrative perspective, very little actually happens in the film, although the characters go through significant emotional arcs, many of which are temporarily blurred by their perceived need to pretend to be one way while feeling another. Like many of Ozu’s films, The Only Son is heavy with regret and the weight of lost opportunities, yet it alleviates its darker realities with an insistent focus on fundamental human decency, which we see in various guises throughout the film--not just the mother’s personal sacrifice for her son, but the son’s later generosity with a neighbor whose son is kicked by a horse and ends up in the hospital. Thus, although the boy’s education did not result in his attaining grand social and economic status, what his mother sacrificed for that education offered a model of how to be that is greater than any monetary sum, even if she never fully realizes it.
Copyright ©2010 James Kendrick Thoughts? E-mail James Kendrick All images copyright © The Criterion Collection | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
The Only Son is available exclusively via The Criterion Collection’s “Two Films by Yasujiro Ozu” box set, which also includes There Was a Father (1942). Overall Rating: 
(3.5)
