An Inn In Tokyo is generally considered to be Ozu's best silent film (of the ones available to us) and to be a foreboder of the Italian neo-realism that would come into full swing a few years later with The Bicycle Thief. The story is rather simple. Kihachi (Takeshi Sakamoto), an unemployed factory worker, and his two sons Zenko and Kuniko (the formidable Yomio Aoki and Kazuko Ojima) roam about the flatlands of Tokyo's outskirts. The father can't find work, and the small family scrapes together the pennies for meager meals by capturing and selling stray dogs. Kihachi happens on an old acquientance, Otsune (Chouko Iida) who gives him shelter and a job. But, social determinism being what it is in Ozu's eyes, just when there seems to be a silver lining in the sky, misfortune strikes again. Kihachi becomes friendly with a homeless single mother (Yoshiko Okada) who lives a similar life of poverty and despair. When he learns that her son suffers from dysentery and that she cannot pay the necessary medical bills, he steals the money and eventually decides to surrender to the police, leaving his beloved sons behind.
Although Ozu never lets room for the hope that the small family could one day ascend the rungs of the social ladder, thus effectively robbing them of a hopeful future, there is a strong emphasis on precisely that future. "We will find you a job", "it is good to live long", it's as if the poorer members of society lived in anticipation of the future without ever being able to escape the present conditions. However, there seems to be an escape: children. The father always tries to cheer up the kids by repeating "tomorrow we'll make it". They never do, of course, but the children are the far more dynamic force. Ozu makes this even more explicit when characters say things like "Childhood is the best time of life" or "I wish I were a child". They, the director seems to say, are the only ones who have a realistic, albeit very small chance to really see another, better life. In this sense, the incredible scene in which Zenko tries to cheer up his starving father by imagining to have a feast, pouring his father tea into an imaginary cup and serving him imaginary rice can be read as an indication that maybe one day these kids might very well be able to eat all that dreamed up food. But, Ozu being always very aware of location, in this scene, the family sits in proximity to an ash spouting factory which makes sure that they are still and always very much tied to the bleak reality of their existence. In choosing this specific locale (the bleak outskirts of the Tokyo suburbs) Ozu makes a strong political point. He pits the galloping modernism, symbolized by the industrial landscape, against the traditional institution of the family.
This existence, Ozu's editing tells us, is above all monotonous and dull. His characteristic mirroring of scenes or shots signify an inescapable succession of "same shit different day". It is again only the kids, symbolizing a future that needs to be unlocked by defying the present, that sometimes succeed in breaking this cycle, but they are ultimately left by their father and there is nothing that indicated that things could take a turn for the good. The film's formal patterning is rigorous. Virtually every scene mirrors a previous one.
Visually, An Inn In Tokyo is striking. Superb cinematography and, as always, sharp editing show Ozu at the height of his craf. And again, assumptions about Ozu's work are misleading. The comparison between his pre-war realism and the Italian post-war realism ignores the fact that Ozu has a much stronger stylistic agenda than De Sica and company. Visual repetition abounds, especially in this movie, and his careful choice of visual motives serves him to create a thematic unity throughout the movie that completely lacks from any Italian neo-realist work.
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