Lucidno
I WAS BORN, BUT… (1975 review)
Japan, 1932 Director: Yasujiro Ozu
Yoshi moves with his wife and two sons, Ryoichi and Keiji, from Azabu to a Tokyo suburb, close to the home of the director of the company where he works. His sons are ostracized and persecuted by the other boys in the neighborhood; arriving late for school after Yoshi urges them to get high marks, they decide to play hooky and do their lessons in a nearby field, forging high marks on their papers which they bring home to show their father. But Yoshi is informed by Ryoichi’s teacher that they were absent from school, and makes sure that they attend the following day. After a delivery boy whom they befriend overpowers a bully who previously defeated Keiji, the boys are accepted as leaders by their local schoolmates. Yoshi’s boss screens home movies for his family and friends, including his son Taro, Yoshi, Ryoichi and Keiji; the latter two are horrified when they see Yoshi making faces and otherwise demeaning himself in the films to please his boss, and a family fight ensues after they and their father return home. When Ryoichi insists that Yoshi shouldn’t accept a salary from his boss, Yoshi replies that he has to in order for them to eat. His sons respond by going on a hunger strike, and Ryoichi is spanked by Yoshi after throwing objects on the floor; both sons go off in tears. In the morning, Yoshi asks his wife to fix them rice balls — which they are eventually persuaded to eat — and, as usual, walks with them part of the way to school. They meet Yoshi’s boss with Taro, and after a moment of embarrassment Ryoichi advises his father to greet him; Yoshi and his boss leave for work in the latter’s car, while Ryoichi, Keiji, Taro and the other local boys depart for school.
During the home movie projection which marks the critical turning point in I Was Born, But . . . from comedy to tragedy, and shortly before Yoshi’s antics appear on the inner screen, Ryoichi and Keiji break into a debate about the zebra they see — does it have black stripes on white, or white stripes on black? — creating a disturbance that momentarily halts the screening. In comparable fashion, a spurious, distracting and no less innocent debate has been persisting for years about Ozu: is he a realist or a formalist? The naïveté of such a question (and the related fallacy that ‘realism’ and ‘stylization’ are somehow alternative choices) has effectively blinded many to Ozu’s genius, as well as Tati’s: whether uncritically embraced for their ‘simple’ humanism or dismissed for their ‘cold’, ‘boring’ or elusive’ formalism, the brilliance of both is lost on a one-eyed public that wants to keep its pleasure simple. If a demonstration is needed that cinematic and social forms are so interrelated for Ozu that they become indistinguishable, I Was Born, But . . . is there to supply it — along with strong counter-evidence to the charge that his total absorption in the commonplaces of middle-class suburbia reflects a reactionary endorsement of its principal values. Because the society that Ozu depicts is essentially bound up in formality, it naturally follows that his sense of this society’s boundaries and limitations is intimately related to its ritual social gestures: Ohayo (Good Morning), his 1959 ‘remake’, pivots around the boys’ questioning of why people say “Good morning” to one another. And even more clearly in this 1932 silent version, Ozu is implicitly offering a radical critique of prevailing social as well as cinematic forms, although the boundaries of his world — like those of Oshima’s in Boy — ultimately make it a tragic vision. Learning to master their immediate social environment by establishing their power to humiliate others, Ryoichi and Keiji are brought to the chilling realization that their father’s power — which hangs over and determines their very existence — is based on his capacity to be humiliated.
Every formal aspect of the film expresses the equivalence of and continuity between the separate worlds inhabited by Yoshi and his sons: two lateral tracking shots in opposite directions across a line of schoolboys marched through drills is followed by another ore proceeding back and forth across desks of yawning employees in Yoshi’s office, with teacher and boss playing comparable roles in the compositions. Low-angle shots from the boys’ eye level are intercut with higher shots favoring Yoshi as he lectures them (while undressing) on getting high marks; this ‘authoritarian’ view is undercut and counterpointed by a less heroic shot of his ungainly socks as seen by his sons. The routes to work and school partially coincide as he walks with them beside railroad tracks to the crossing (a path traversed many times in the film), where he departs in his boss’ sedan and the kids (including Taro) join the others. The field crossed on the latter’s route is where the boys do their schoolwork when playing hooky, and parallel tracking shots link the two there with the arrival of the delivery boy, from whom they ask help in forging their high marks — an emissary between their world and their parents’ who later protects them against the local bully in ‘exchange’ for the news that their mother will order beer because it’s Father’s payday. And this same bully, moreover, is glimpsed running ahead of his schoolmates in the film’s penultimate shot, going out of his way to greet his teacher a second time. Indeed, if the climactic family crisis registers with an explosive force — Ryoichi screaming “I’m not afraid of you. You’re a nothing you’re a nobody”, and getting brutally spanked after further violence, followed by Yoshi telling his wife ”l give up”, and taking out his liquor bottle — this is partially because everything preceding it has led to this awful impasse. Even in the print under review — evidently running short of the ‘original’ 89 minutes listed in some sources or the 100 suggested by another — the extraordinary unity of Ozu’s conception lends relevance and resonance to every fleeting detail, so that neither the above synopsis nor any abbreviated charting of relationships can begin to describe the film’s richness, or the potential impact of its theme. Writing in Moviegoer nearly a decade ago, James Stoller remarked that “it invites comparisons to Vigo, but has charm and physical grace and density that eluded the Frenchman; it surpasses Vigo’s schoolboy anarchy with its sad, Olympian intimations not only of the spirit but of the closing in of the culture upon it, of the absolute necessity of compromise and the denial of animal will”.
Jonathan ROSENBAUM
first published in:
www.jonathanrosenbaum.net/2021/12/i-was-born-but-1975-review-tk/?fbclid=IwAR0RRohUFbPa1ftwwiztcajsL4RpptZNxvZK0NRQ4N6vdNBHY2G50634XhA
