Deconstructing a myth: Ozu has always been on my radar, at least ever since I began tapping into "auteur", or "independent", or "early" cinema many years ago. But I had always read more about his work than I had actually watched his movies. And approaching his work, the consensus among critics, writers and even scholars is so unanimous that, even though I had only seen a vanishing minority of Ozu's films, my idea of his oeuvre as a whole is so precise as if I had studied every single of his available films with great care. His theme is the family. His plots are uneventful. His style is minimalistic and evokes Zen Buddhism. His camera hovers immobile 3 feet above the ground, enabling the audience to observe everything from the point of view of a seated Japanese. These characteristics are such a commonplace in discussing Ozu that I simply assumed they were true, although I had only an approximate idea of his work.
Brothers and Sisters of the Toda Family (Todake no kyodai) is seemingly an early example of all these "Ozuisms". It is with this film that he introduced what David Bordwell called "the extended family plot" (i was very confused at times, as one has to keep track of 16 different family members and close friends) and anticipated later stylistic attributes. But watching this film, originated during the Sino-Japanese war, what led some scholars to accuse it of being propagandistic, I realized more and more that reducing Ozu to these few bullet points does not begin to do his work justice.
Toda Family opens with the death of the patriarch and then observes how the widow Mrs. Toda and her youngest daughter Setsuko are shoved around from family household to family household, until the youngest son Shojiro, who had gone away to work in China shortly after his father's death, offers them to live with him and gives a tongue-lashing to his family about how disrespectful their behavior was towards his mother and sister. The strong emphasis on patriarchy in this movie (the death of the man of the household plunges the family into turmoil and it belongs to another man to restore its order) has been criticized, but it is, in my mind, more a generational critique. The oldest and the youngest, the wise and those who still have to fight for life, are the ones Ozu seems to regard best, while he dismisses the "middle-aged" as nagging and spoiled brats. This becomes evident in the way most of the daughters treat Setsuko and her mother as a nuisance when they are at their place, while the youngest of the bunch Ryokichi and Mrs. Toda bond in a very sweet scene where he shows him his snot under a microscope, and then tells her a secret which she promises him to keep. Toda Family also harshly criticizes the well-to-do - the Toda family definitely belongs to the higher classes - by depicting the upper-class life as wasteful and decadent, reinforcing his critique of the ones who can sit comfortably threw life. No wonder people in the movie seem obsessed with figures, be it age, age differences, or money. In Ozu's eyes, these chicaneries hold no value at all. Only the most self-absorbed - and thus removed from life - concern themselves with it.
What struck me most however was the humor shining threw even the most grim scenes. From Shojiro putting his hat on his sister's head during the wake of the funeral to Ozu's use of repetition to create comedic moments (the maid is asked twice to call a taxi, and is finally sent to prepare rice balls), he takes a lot of time to capture otherwise mundane moments and infuse them with cheerfulness. Repetition is key anyway, as it will be in all his later work, shots of hallways and living rooms are set up in the same way at different times in the movie, scenes echoing each other, and certain visuals are recalled time in time again to reinforce the theme (the bird, the father's picture).
All in all a satisfying viewing experience and a very good starting point to either go ahead and observe how his style solidified, or go back into Ozu's catalogue and explore his silent work. I will do the latter, as I am much more interested in Ozu's stylistic roots.
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