I Was Born, But . . .

                         
Director: Yasujiro Ozu
Year: 1932
Rating: 9.0
This sweet silent slice of life comedy from Yasujiro Ozu startles you with how quietly profound it becomes as it goes along. It has no particular dramatic event that propels it but Ozu manages to capture so much of life's anxieties from childhood to adulthood. Watching this brought on waves of memories from my childhood that had long been put into storage. When I think of those days now it is usually with great fondness - two wonderful parents, friends I played baseball or marbles with, traded baseball cards with, seemingly all the time in the world, TV in the afternoons after school and food always on the table.



But as I watched this other thoughts crept in - there were also times of enormous anxiety on my part that has partly formed who I am. We moved around a lot as my father was in the Foreign Service - from country to country every few years - and just like the two children in this film you have to try and fit in, find new friends, say goodbye to old ones never to see again, measure what your status is, live up to your parent's expectations, face up to the bullies which I did on a few occasions, put your marker down. And this continues through your life, through employment, marriage, bringing up your children - always finding your place, trying to be calm and responsible when everything inside you is turning to jelly. Near the end the parents in the film look at their sleeping boys with pure unadulterated love and the father says "Will they lead the same sorry lives we have?" and it is an extraordinarily emotional moment like a gut punch out of nowhere because you realize that though the focus of the film has been on the two boys, the parents have their own hard backstory that we never get a glimpse of. 




Yoshi (Tatsuo Saitô), his wife and two young boys have moved to a new neighborhood to be closer to work. Described as the suburbs but closer to being a small rural town. He is a mid-level manager and they live in a small house with a front yard. The two boys Keiji (Tomio Aoki) and Ryoichi (Hideo Sugarawa) are echoes of one another - about a year apart in age they are able to communicate with each other with a simple look or body language. What one does, the other soon follows. It is a delight to watch their choreographed behavior - not in the least bit cute - just regular boys - the younger one with a cheeky mug that spells trouble later in life. They quickly run into the local mischief making boy's gang of about six of them - all wearing their caps or in one case a bowler hat. They are not bad kids at all - but they have to test the new kids. Their leader is a larger boy who is used to pushing the others around a bit. They butt heads quickly and the larger boy says wait till we get you in school.




They intimidate Keiji and Ryoichi so much that they stop going to school, play hooky and forge grades to show dad. He finds out they have not been going to school and their confrontation is wonderful as it slowly dawns on the boys that their ruse which they were so proud of has fallen through and dad knows everything. That dread when we were children when we did something wrong and are about to get caught. Mine (one of many) was when I got suckered into playing poker with some older children and lost everything I didn't have. I went home, up to my room and closed the door. The little jerks actually came around to collect and I knew I was in for a lecture on personal responsibility. Why was it that we got away with so little? Mothers were like X-ray machines who saw everything, could read you like a well-thumbed book.





The tonal shift in the film occurs when the boys and their father go over to his boss's home to look at home movies. In the home movies their father is caught making funny faces and they notice how subservient he is to his boss - whose son is one of the gang that the two boys are now part of. This infuriates them. They thought their dad was the most important man in town - they are humiliated - and accuse him of being a loser. It is painful to watch because the father is such a good man and lives a dignified life - their words cut him like a knife because there is truth there but he is doing the best that the social order will allow him. He says to his wife "I don't like cozying up to the boss but our lives are far better off now than they were before". He takes care of his family. That is the true measure of a man. In the end the rice balls save the day. This is a great film. Quite amusing at times with the boys acting out but underneath it all is the lurking horror in all our lives, the anxiety that follows us forever, the quiet desperation we keep hidden within us.