Today is Yasujiro Ozu's birthday.
When the patriarch of the Kajiwara family dies, his young sons Sadao and Kosaku are told that they have to support their mother Chieko. Eight years later, Sadao, now a college student, learns that he is not Chieko's biological son but the offspring of his father's first wife. He scolds Chieko for treating him better than Kosaku and tries everything to alienate them both because he does not feel worthy of their care. In the end, the family pulls together and all the conflict is resolved. Ozu himself has said about A Mother Should Be Loved that "the script should've been polished more (...) the film turned out to be rather dull". I for one rather enjoyed this film as it presents an interesting variation of his favorite theme, male authority. But watching this movie, from which the first and last reels are missing, I kept thinking about something that bothered me about Donald Richie's account of how the director and his collaborators put together their scripts in his 1974 book Ozu.
Richie's description of Ozu's work method and his diary excerpts are fascinating. What troubles me is Richie's assertion that Ozu's scripts are superior to most others because of his unorthodox approach to writing. He observes about "conventional" scripts: "they are begun at some hopefully propitious juncture, and character is observed to form. The story or plot rises from this character, or the story or plot forces the character to evolve in a certain way, and when action is over and a change observed, the script is considered finished." He goes on to write: "Ozu had little use for [this model], feeling that it distorted character and destroyed verisimilitude." Ozu's stories, one can read, emanate exclusively from character, are purely anecdotal and incidental and don't follow any common (western) plot arc. Let's now, just as a mind game, consider A Mother Should Be Loved and how, if one wanted, one could divide its story into a regular Hollywood three-act structure. Usually, and speaking in very broad strokes, the first act of a Hollywood script establishes the world the movie will take place in, as well as the characters and their relations. Act two break occurs when a major incident forces the main character(s) to go on a journey of some kind in order to fulfill a need or overcome an obstacle that upset the order we have seen in Act 1. Midpoint is reached when the main protagonist realizes that his need is much deeper or his problem different from what he thought, propelling him into a new direction. Act three break occurs when the protagonist finally figured out how to overcome the obstacles and complete his journey. Act three is, to speak with Jaccob Krueger, "kicking ass or getting ass kicked".
Now consider the film we are discussing here. The first reel, as I mentioned, is missing, but from what one can read about it, it establishes the family dynamic (especially the relationship between the father and his two sons). I would consider this the first act. Act one break occurs at the father's death, creating the need for both sons to care for the mother and exposing the conflict between Chieko and Sadao. I would argue that Sadao is in this case the main character who's emotional journey is dictated by the want to belong emotionally to a family structure that he feels has been taken away from him by the news that Chieko is not his biological mother. The story's midpoint is reached when Sadao alienates Chieko so much that she cries, prompting Kosaku to confront his brother about it. It ends in a physical fight and Sadao leaves the family. Chieko then tells Kosaku the truth about Sadao's origins. Act three break occurs when Sadao is finally convinced to accept his family situation and recognizes that Chieko and Kosaku love him no matter what. The missing ninth reel, the family's reunion and their move to the suburbs, constitutes the third act, or "kicking ass".
Of course, all the above is a wholly artificial mind-game, over-simplyfied and probably inaccurate. And my point is not to argue that Ozu in fact worked with a Hollywood type blueprint (although he was a fervent admirer of Hollywood cinema which doubtlessly left many traces on his work - one example would be the americanized Dragnet Girl). Of course his stories are more deeply concerned with character than most others, and his films generally very meditative. But can't they be just that? Why must Western critics always infuse his work with some kind of Eastern mysticism that seemingly elevates his films above the rest, but doesn't make much sense once one takes a closer look? To get back to Richie's account of Ozu's writing process, he describes how the director and his frequent collaborator Kogo Noda went from the original idea, to an outline and disposition of characters, to the actual script writing. Both men would write ideas for scenes on cards and arrange them in a way that seemed satisfactory. Sometimes they shuffled the cards on a table and rearranged them from there, as it was commonly done for animated cartoons. "Even then", Richie writes, "'work' had not even begun".
Firstly, the author completely misunderstands what a screenwriter actually does. What we call "breaking" a story, in Ozu's case writing down scenes on cards and shuffling them on a table, is the lion's share of what Richie calls here the actual "work", the writing. It is the creation of characters and plot, before tackling it in script form, that constitutes the real work of the screenwriter. In that, Ozu is not different from anyone else. He is just very good at it. Furthermore, doesn't the fact that Ozu and his writing partners took meticulous care that individual scenes would be placed at the exact right spot contradict Richie's prior assertion that Ozu's work consisted simply of intuitive character work? Ozu might have said once that plot "bores" him, but Noda writes in his diary: "March 15. Started, but decided some large comic incident is lacking. March 16. We've constructed something or other, but something is missing". If Ozu "decides" on plot points and "constructs" events, what, then, does Richie mean when he writes "certainly there is in his films rarely anything resembling [plot]"?
Sure, Ozu doesn't stage skating robots and broom riding contests, but what else than "story [rising] from character" (Richie about Western-style screenplays) does he give us in A Mother Should Be Loved when he invents a family situation that will lead to inevitable confrontations between the different family members, all resulting in a certain fallout that creates new conflict so as to reignite the story every 10 or so minutes? What Richie ignores is that in the absence of external conflict (skating robots) the writer turns to internal conflict (Sadao's guilt and resentment) and makes it his plot. And as he demonstrates in chapter 2 of his book, Ozu went to great length to get that plot right.
This is not to say that Ozu's work is interchangeable with the myriad other authors who simply crank out by-the-numbers scripts, and he surely developed his very own style over time. A Mother Should Be Loved simply reminds us that sweeping generalizations about Ozu ignore a lot of facets of his work. Western critics have not done right by the complexity and diversity of his oeuvre. Especially his early films would be a great starting point for a general re-evaluation of Ozu's body of work by more adept minds than myself.
0 comments:
Post a Comment