Beloved for his poetic observations of domestic life and intergenerational conflict, Yasujiro Ozu is an icon of international art-house cinema whose patient, exquisitely restrained style has influenced filmmakers around the world. But even though he directed more than fifty features over the course of his nearly four-decade career, the Japanese auteur is still primarily associated with two midcentury classics, Tokyo Story and Late Spring, both of which regularly appear on lists of the greatest films of all time. To commemorate the 120th anniversary of the director’s birth, we invited six writers to explore the retrospective of his films now playing on the Criterion Channel and shine a spotlight on a lesser-known gem. Covering different periods in Ozu’s career, from his beginnings in the silent era to the end of his life in the early 1960s, this series of essays foregrounds underacknowledged elements of his artistry, including his love of classic Hollywood comedy, his flair for melodrama, the various forms of masculinity depicted in his work, and the queer resonances of his family portraits.
I Flunked, But . . . (1930)
By Pamela Hutchinson
A film as bittersweet and ironic as its title, I Flunked, But . . . is Yasujiro Ozu’s sprightly tribute to the pleasures of some of his favorite American movies, as well as to a life experience that eluded him. It may surprise those who know only his later work that Ozu was smitten with the joys of Hollywood cinema—comedy in particular—as a young man. Early in his career, he was indebted to American studio filmmaking, the techniques of which formed the foundation of his own education in the art form, in lieu of a more formal variety.
In I Flunked, But . . ., he tips his hat to the charm of Harold Lloyd’s feature films, specifically the college shenanigans and impromptu jive of The Freshman (1925). The schoolmates in Ozu’s film elaborate on Lloyd’s own steps with miniature routines, while the director alights on patterns in the synchronized movements of both students and professors, suggesting a unity of purpose in the academic factory: the passage from scholar to graduate to working man. Ozu also demonstrates his mastery of the more complex ironies found in Ernst Lubitsch’s sophisticated silent comedies, the “but” of the title as ever hinting that life is complicated and plans are made to be scuppered. The notes that will guarantee the boys’ exam success are first obliterated by ink and then bleached away in the laundry.
Ozu, who barely scraped out of high school and failed entrance exams for two colleges, had never lived the student life he depicts with such verve. Instead of following his peers’ more conventional paths, Ozu took a junior position at the Shochiku studio in 1923, and precociously directed his first feature in 1927. By the time he made this college comedy—just over an hour long, and shot in a week—he was beginning to be noticed as a director of promise, and the movie features the first major role for the man who would become his favorite actor, Chishu Ryu. Like the friends in I Flunked, But . . ., Ozu had turned academic failure into an opportunity to play. The misfits return to college as cheerleaders, sidestepping the stress of jobhunting, which can only lead to the boredom and toil of work (reflected in the disillusioned salarymen who recur in Ozu’s filmography) or, very likely at the time, the ignominy of unemployment.
The youthful director—who had turned up at his own high-school graduation in a brand-new uniform, fully expecting to reenroll the following year—represents academic success as a trap. Why work so hard, only to be forced to confront the difficulties of the real world? Instead of succumbing to expectation and embarking on careers of wage-drudgery, his deadbeat heroes refashion the world: their energetic performance at a cheer rally transforms the rhythms of university and city life, the toe-tapping and pen-drumming of tedium, into a pattern of their own design.
Pamela Hutchinson is a freelance writer, critic, and film historian. Her publications include the BFI Film Classics volumes on The Red Shoes and Pandora’s Box, as well as essays in several collections. She blogs at SilentLondon.co.uk.
A Mother Should Be Loved (1934)
By Genevieve Yue
The first and last reels of A Mother Should Be Loved are, unfortunately, missing. We never meet the father whose sudden death strains the relationships between his two sons and wife, nor do we see the eventual reconciliation between Sadao, the eldest, and his mother, Chieko. Their long estrangement had been caused by the revelation of a painful secret: Sadao is not Chieko’s son by birth. Instead, he was born to his father’s first wife, who died soon after. He is now, effectively, an orphan.
As placeholders, the missing reels open the film to imaginative possibilities. What might have happened differently? They now play a similar function to Ozu’s famous “pillow shots,” a key element of his unique cinematic grammar. These images of clotheslines, trains, and slipper-lined corridors are adjacent to the action, a part of what happens, but also outside it. The world exists with and beyond the characters, who, absorbed in their problems, would probably fail to notice it.
Ozu’s stable of recurring actors further allow us to imagine alternate outcomes for his characters. As Chieko, Mitsuko Yoshikawa is once again a suffering mother, following similar roles in I Was Born, But . . . (1932) and The Only Son (1936). Self-effacing and slight, her composure is betrayed by large and sorrowful eyes. The strongest performance comes from Iida Choko, who here recalls the self-sacrificing mother she plays in The Only Son. After Sadao viciously upbraids his mother, Choko, a maid at the brothel where he resides, asks if she might speak. She tells him that she has a son his age. He smirks. “Do you mean to say he’s better than me?” She smiles wearily. “If he was, I never would’ve taken a job like this.”
This is one of the most heartbreaking lines in all of Ozu. So many of his films revolve around a family unit that has been fractured, whether by illness, war, or the less-perceptible dislocations of modern life. Ozu’s own father passed away while he was shooting this film, though he was already only a dim presence in his son’s life. Ozu attached himself to his mother, with whom he lived until her passing in 1962 (he died the following year). Though he maintained a faith that broken families could be rebuilt, A Mother Should Be Loved shows just how difficult that can be.
Genevieve Yue is an associate professor of culture and media and director of the screen studies program at the New School. She is the author of Girl Head: Feminism and Film Materiality (Fordham University Press, 2020).
Record of a Tenement Gentleman (1947)
By Musab Younis
Ozu is not usually seen as a queer filmmaker. There are scattered references to what critic Tony Rayns calls his “homosexual impulses”—he was expelled from his boarding school dormitory after writing love letters to another boy; he never married. But Ozu’s queerness goes beyond such biographical details. He displays a constitutively queer interest in the family’s strangeness and inevitable dissolution, the difficulty that attends to trying to meet its expectations, the plight of those who find themselves outside its voracious and insistent claims. So he brings us unmarried young women; dying and disappointed parents; ungrateful, disobedient, and disillusioned children—and, as in Record of a Tenement Gentleman, widows.
The film focuses on Otane, a widow living alone in a working-class Tokyo neighborhood, and Kohei, a seven-year-old boy. They are not mother and son. Kohei arrives at Otane’s house after being separated from his father and following her neighbor Tashiro home. The child is forced on Otane by Tashiro and another neighbor, Tamekichi. Both are men.
What follows—Otane’s cruelty toward Kohei, his almost horror-movie-like refusal to leave her side, her growing affection for him, her desolation at his eventual departure—differs from the angelic and compassionate widowhood we witness in Tokyo Story. Otane is not mourning the avenues closed by the death of her husband. She appears to have found independence and equilibrium before Tashiro and Tamekichi foist the child onto her like an unwanted pregnancy. Her strenuous efforts to abandon him fail.
By bringing a young bedwetting child into a working-class widow’s house, Ozu deconstructs the mother-and-son relationship. In the process, he parodies the whole structure of heterosexual kinship. This makes Record of a Tenement Gentleman a special film for Ozu. Whereas the relationships he usually explores—however dysfunctional—are those of “real” families, in this film he abstracts the family entirely, creating an almost surreal configuration that stresses the tenuousness of kinship. Neither Otane nor Kohei wanted their relationship. The longer it exists, the more it locks them into a form of dependency. Yet the return of patriarchal authority in the form of the boy’s father at the end of the film crushes even this dubious and unequal emotional connection.
More than Ozu’s other films, Record of a Tenement Gentleman brings our attention to the deep and voiceless suffering of the child alongside the structures of kinship that adults find themselves trapped in. Otane’s self-professed personal growth is not matched by a blossoming of the child’s love for his new mother. Kohei remains buffeted between adults. He is never asked his opinion. The film’s enigmatic final scene in Ueno Park presents a vision of a world of children without any adults—a bracing corrective to the bounded life of Kohei.
Musab Younis’s first book, On the Scale of the World: The Formation of Black Anticolonial Thought, was published in 2022.
A Hen in the Wind (1948)
By Sean Gilman
“Well, everyone has his failures. There are all kinds of failures, however, and some of my failures I like. This film is a bad failure.” So Yasujiro Ozu wrote about A Hen in the Wind near the end of his life. But why exactly did he consider the film a failure? Since the early 1940s, he had been trying to do away completely with what he called “drama.” By which he appears to have meant “plot”: the sequence of events that screenwriting manuals refer to as inciting incidents, turning points, and rising actions. But A Hen in the Wind is all plot, as traditional a melodrama as anything the Hollywood studio system ever produced.
Kinuyo Tanaka plays a mom who has been waiting patiently for her husband (Shuji Sano) to be demobilized from the army, scrounging what little money she can find by selling her belongings. But when her son has a sudden medical emergency, she finds that the only way to pay the bill is by selling herself as a prostitute. Three weeks later, her husband comes home and she admits everything, sending him into a depressive spiral that ends with him throwing her down some stairs, and then deciding to forgive her. It’s not an unfamiliar story—you can see its antecedents in everything from the various versions of Waterloo Bridge to the Ruan Lingyu classic The Goddess—and its finale, with the miraculous transformation of the husband reaching toward a love-conquering-all transcendence, recalls the best of Frank Borzage.
These are fine, often great, precedents to follow, but Ozu’s preferred version of film realism requires a sublimation of emotion, with internally directed performances drawing the viewer into a world that patiently gains an overwhelming power via the accumulation of the smallest repetitions and details. It is inherently at odds with the melodramatic approach. A Hen in the Wind’s broad drama makes for an uneasy fit with the style Ozu was reaching toward in the late ’40s, but that very mismatch can help us better understand the highly idiosyncratic style and the extraordinary harmony and balance he would find in his greatest films.
And though A Hen in the Wind may not have been a success for him, it definitely is for anyone who can appreciate a terrific melodrama starring one of the great actors of her time. The movie works very well on its own terms (assuming one can extend the kind of empathy toward the husband that the film requires for its ending to be truly moving), and while the scenes between the couple together are built out of the broad emotions and big actions the genre demands, there are also some wonderfully quiet moments where Sano’s character attempts to work through his feelings (anger, guilt, jealousy, self-reproach), especially in a touching scene with Ozu stalwart Chishu Ryu. A Hen in the Wind can be considered a failure only by its maker’s own exacting standards. For anyone else, it’s an odd duck, but a worthy one.
Sean Gilman is a film critic based in Tacoma, Washington. He has written extensively on East Asian film at MUBI’s Notebook, In Review Online, Frameland, and his own site, the Chinese Cinema.
Equinox Flower (1958)
By Aliza Ma
Yasujiro Ozu was a master at distilling the pathos of passing moments, though he was never fully in lockstep with the times. He made his first color film, Equinox Flower, in 1958, almost a decade after the Japanese movie industry had taken to a range of new chromatic possibilities opened up by the advent of color-film-processing technologies. (On the other hand, he never deviated from his preferred 1:33:1 frame, even as Japan began to favor wider aspect ratios.) It was worth the wait. This modern family drama (shomin-geki) brings his distinctive array of themes and concerns into a revelatory, heightened register of expression, with a lushness that touches upon the Sirkian.
In trademark Ozu fashion, the melancholy of cosmic impermanence is summed up by the most casual of exchanges in the film’s first scene. A couple of train-station workers take a break from checking out the brides on the platform to remark upon a storm warning: “Bad things follow the good,” one of them says guilelessly. This foreshadowed trouble comes in the form of generational discord in the copacetic upper-middle-class Hirayama family, which falls into crisis when father Wataru (former matinee idol Shin Saburi) finds out his elder daughter, Setsuko (Ineko Arima), has made her own plans to marry Taniguchi (Keiji Sada) just as he and his wife, Kiyoko (Kinuyo Tanaka, in her seventh and final collaboration with Ozu), are beginning to arrange her marriage to someone else. Burrowing into his anger, Wataru forces Setsuko to stay home, launches investigations into Taniguchi’s background, and threatens to boycott their wedding.
For anyone who has come to Ozu’s work through unassailable black-and-white masterpieces like Tokyo Story and Late Spring, the films of his that tend to receive the most critical attention, the vision of the director’s domestic worlds saturated with color feels like an epiphany. In his perfectly composed frames, he uses color to signify shifting codes and attitudes, paying special attention to striking shades of red—visible in the lining of a kimono, a lacquered teapot, the young girls’ lipstick, and the neon signs in the streets of Ginza—to convey both traditional and modernist values. Hallmarks of his familiar visual style like his “pillow shots”—everyday scenes lingered on for a moment longer than expected—are even more quietly overwhelming than they are in monochrome.
In the most memorable scene of the film, the Hirayamas go on vacation in the hot-spring town of Hakone. What starts as a pleasant, bucolic moment takes a sharp turn into emotional devastation. If Setsuko gets married, this could be their last outing together, and Kiyoko pleads with her husband to not leave to play golf. She confesses that she misses the war because, despite their poverty and instability at the time, they were so much closer. Suddenly, with the acknowledgement that the fleeting present is always filled with lost pasts, Ozu imbues the magnificent scenery with unbearable wistfulness.
The great critic Robin Wood observed that marriages in Ozu’s films are deathlike, both in their prefigurement of parental deaths and in their destruction of personal identity, especially for women in postwar Japan. But in Equinox Flower, matrimony doesn’t hinder the female characters from accessing a secret power source, as evinced by Kiyoko’s twinkling eyes and enigmatic smile even as she dutifully goes about her chores. Eventually, the women in Wataru’s life run circles around him, and his stubbornness is rendered feeble. Perhaps the power they find is something like patience—one of Ozu’s greatest virtues. If you wait long enough, there’s always a chance the good might come again.
Aliza Ma is a writer and the head of programming for the Criterion Channel.
The End of Summer (1961)
By Moeko Fujii
I have a photograph pinned to my wall, captioned “Dancing Ozu,” in which the director covers his face with a scarf—coyly, or shyly?—while dancing drunkenly at a dinner party. The image is at odds with what we tend to conceive of as masculinity in his films. When we think of Ozu’s men, what most readily comes to mind is taciturn Chishu Ryu and his ability to suffuse the slightest gesture or comment—the peeling of an apple, a remark on the weather—with profound resignation as people move on without him. But to focus only on Ryu would be to miss a crucial part of what makes some of Ozu’s films work: his particular sense of theatricality.
In The End of Summer, Ozu’s penultimate film, Ryu is relegated to the background, playing a stranger farming at the edge of the frame who comments on the action like a Greek chorus. Another leading man in Ozu’s world, the celebrated kabuki actor Ganjiro Nakamura, takes the fore as a patriarch who proves to be an impish source of trouble for his family. The protagonist is constantly sneaking out to see his mistress, even interrupting a game of hide-and-seek (a visual metaphor that acquires greater dramatic resonance later in the film) with his grandson to do so. The role aligns with the screen persona Nakamura had developed in a previous collaboration with Ozu, Floating Weeds (1959), in which he starred as the head of a kabuki troupe. Nakamura is never just a father; he plays larger-than-life men who are never quite there for their families, old playboys who are constantly on the move and slipping away to embrace an alternate, more vibrant life. Unlike Ryu, whose acting brings us ever inward, Nakamura envelops us with a sense of grandeur and play that he manipulates like a multihued cape.
For the father in The End of Summer, aging does not entail retreat; instead, it inspires him to grab hold of more world, to discover another self, to stay out for one last call. Understanding Ozu requires us to reconcile the dueling impulses exhibited by Ryu and Nakamura, and this film guides us in detecting the disappearance of the individual in song and in play. The End of Summer is one of the most important instances in the director’s oeuvre where masculine theatricality thoroughly trumps quiet interiority.
