Ozu's first talkie. And from all of his films I have seen so far, this is the one that makes the gap between "tradition" and "modernity", between "rural" and "urban", between "hope" and "disappointment" the most explicit. It recalls the "neo-realist" bleakness of An Inn In Tokyo (Ozu conceived the The Only Son as silent film at first) but adds another layer of despair and resignation. Ozu's grim social determinism translates here in the dreary assertion that once children grow up, they can only deceive their parents. The parents, in turn, will have to accept that all the effort, money and time they invested in their children won't pay off as hoped. The Only Son is also another example showing that labeling Ozu's work simply as "traditional Japanese" doesn't do it justice at all. Yes, he is concerned with Japanese issues (what sensible director wouldn't pay attention to what is going on around him?) but he has a far more nuanced point of view than is usually acknowledged by Western critics, and a wiredrawn sense of historical context. For The Only Son is not only a family drama, but also a biting social commentary of the unfulfilled hopes of economic prosperity during the Meiji era in Japan.
The plot is simple. Ryosuke goes to highschool although his mother, the widowed Tsune, can barely afford it, and later leaves his native village to study and find work in Tokyo, promising his mother to become a great man. Years later, when Tsune visits Ryosuke in his new home for the first time, she learns that he is now married and has a son. Furthermore, he only made as a nightschool teacher and is not in the best financial situation. Crestfallen, she accuses him of having given up.
What I found the most compelling about this film was not the family plot per se, but how Ozu staged the diatribe between the dreadful rural life, and the irredeemability of the city life for the lower classes. The Tokyo of The Only Son is not the buzzing urban Tokyo of Dragnet Girl. It's the bleak industrial cesspool of An Inn In Tokyo. Ozu shoots the factories, waste disposal plants and the palsied barracks that give shelter to the exploited workers similarly in both films. The scene where mother and son talk about his present situation, with a dark Golem of a factory always looming in the background, almost as if it were ready to devour them both in its incessant race for efficient industrialism, clearly recalls the scene in An Inn In Tokyo where the father and two sons, sitting in front of a towering factory building, mime having a feast when in reality their stomachs are growling. "Modern" living conditions don't fare well with Ozu's characters, and he makes sure to drive home his point by repeatedly using modernity's iconic symbol of the alienating and repulsing factory, culminating in the jarring shot of a horse grazing peacefully, while a smokestack spouts ashes in the background.
Another interesting thing that is never talked about but clearly hinted at visually, is how "urban modernity" - I use this term very loosely without attaching a precise meaning to it and it will be another thing to determine what modernity means to Ozu - is in part dependent on the rural backbone of the country. Tsune works in a silk factory and Ozu insists on it by repeatedly cutting to her workplace. When she arrives at Ryosuke's new home, almost immediately we get a shot of some laundry hanging outside to dry. The countryside, it seems, provides raw material, matter and human, for the project of urban modernity Ozu seems to hint at here. But the outcome on both sides is bleak. Workers in the city are as miserable as workers in the countryside. The promise of modernity is empty. The average man or woman doesn't win, no matter what they do. And they can't escape. When Tsune returns home she tells a co-worker that her son his doing fine, even though she really is disappointed by him. Shortly after, she steps outside and cries. And the factory courtyard, as framed by Ozu, suddenly looks more like a prison courtyard. We don't know what ultimately becomes of the son, but I don't believe in any kind of happy ending for him either.
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