Two by Ozu: ‘The Only Son’ & ‘There Was a Father’
Originally published in Counter Arts on March 21, 2025.
To pretend to truly comprehend life in post-WWI Japan as a 21st Century white guy would be shameful, but even with a little bit of preparatory research for nominal context, The Only Son (1936) is a miraculously compassionate and quietly devastating snapshot of an era and culture for the societal majority, themes which no other Japanese filmmaker — perhaps no other global filmmaker — cased better or more touchingly than Yasujirō Ozu. His work is always entrancing for its craftsmanship and precision and for its emotional gravity and tenderness, and The Only Son is a prime example.
A shot of floating silk fibers carries heavy subtext after barely 10 minutes of runtime. A dripping exterior faucet with industrial silos and a pickup truck in the background do it again at 30 minutes. An empty bed in the foreground with vague significance. Smokestacks in a field holding two lives on their figurative shoulders. You don’t even realize the effect of the images until they mount a towering collective perspective, and it feels like actual magic, like Ozu programmed in your mind a memory of poetry you didn’t know you’d experienced.
When the mother, Tsune (Chōko), a widow, tells her son Ryosuke she gave up her house so that he could continue his education, with Ryosuke’s wife crying behind a wall, Ozu cuts to the corner of the sleeping infant grandson’s room for 55 seconds, simmering in the sounds of sadness and gratitude, and another image is imbued with implausible complexity from what independently has little.
And of course, he always finds his way to a punctuation that activates the deepest human feelings. The ending here is unsurprisingly perfect — intimately heartbreaking, subtly triumphant, and culturally enlightening. The Only Son is like making a million dollars from a penny, a temple from a stick; you think you’re watching a minor work and it turns out to be one of the greatest.
InThere Was a Father, Ozu inverts The Only Son’s widow for a widower. The procession is hardly altered thematically — the father, Shuhei (the inimitable Chishū Ryū, who appeared in 52 of Ozu’s 54 films), similarly works in service to his son’s future and wishes for him to become “a great man” — but Ozu adds an extrafamilial guilt to the mix for additional emotional weight.
A common tonal structure of Ozu’s work sees hardship on a descending curve and then a slow restoration, ending with a bittersweet epiphany. That curve in There Was a Father dips as low as any of Ozu’s films, I’d argue, and its epiphany is more frugal on sweetness than most. By here, 1942, Ozu’s third decade in filmmaking and with over 30 features for experience, his camera is close to settling on its eventual legend: pristine, static composition, and resting on shots (including “pillow shots” synonymous with Ozu), like in The Only Son, that defy the alternatives from which drama would seem best drawn, but which are, to Ozu’s genius, so innately expressive of the feelings of his characters and settings that one can’t imagine anything more effective at all. A(nother) knockback gut punch — perhaps his hardest-hitting final shot sequence — and another brilliant work.
Footnote: Criterion’s restored transfer, from a single surviving print, is crackly, loud, and chaotic (not a criticism), and coincidentally adds fever to the film’s tragedy and to Shuhei’s burden of emotional, financial, and maternal strain. It’s a heavy experience that begs to be chased by his happiest masterpiece, Good Morning.