I conclude my quest into Ozu's pre-war work with his earliest surviving film, Days of Youth. A relatively light-hearted student comedy, the film follows the rivalry between Watanabe and Yamamoto who compete for the love of the beautiful Chieko. Again, the film is structured in two parts. We first get Watanabe and Yamamoto cramming for their final exams while courting Chieko. The second part takes place at a ski resort where they both spend four days with the student's ski club. They run unexpectedly into Chieko who spends a skiing trip there as well. The courting resumes until they learn that she is engaged to the ski club's leader and is there to undertake wedding arrangements. Watanabe and Yamamoto take the train home and resolve to forget Chieko. Bros before Hoes, one would say today.
In Days of Youth, Ozu's style is still in its infancy, but we can already delineate clearly what elements he would develop later. Most strikingly perhaps, Ozu already relies heavily on parallels, symmetries and narrative circles. The opening pan from right to left over Wasada University is mirrored at the end of the film, when the camera pans from left to right at the exact same spot. Similarly, on a narrative level, Watanabe opens the film by placing a "Room for Rent" sign on his window, and closes the movie in the exact same manner. In between, Ozu employs a battery of repetitions and parallels, most notably during the skiing trip where Ozu uses repetitions to underline the emotional changes of our two main protagonists. The director also uses cuts on action and his signature cut-aways, here still motivated more or less by character point of view. However, his fondness for steam and smoke is already well present and provides us with a first "unmotivated" cut-away. We get a close-up of a steaming tea pot (another motive that will reappear prominently as his career went on). The camera pans up, following the vapors. Cut to a smoking chimney, and the camera follows the movement of the smoke as well. Furthermore, when Ozu doesn't use fade outs to mark the end of a sequence (what he still does a lot in Days of Youth), he uses a number of match-cuts that smooth the transition between scenes.
On a thematic level, Ozu provides a first glimpse into his subsequent exploration of weak masculinity. Although Watanabe and Yamamoto are fairly different in character (the first being a sort of witty bon vivant, and the latter being more of a tortured intellectual), they are both failing at college and unable to attract Chieko's interest. Their rivalry is ultimately meaningless as they will lose Chieko to a man who is only mentioned in passing. Again, the only thing to do for the beaten and emasculated man is to leave and start anew. Chieko's courting by our love-crazed protagonists provides the backdrop for several slapstick sequences. Early on, there is a running gag involving black paint on Yamamoto's hand, gloves and hot chocolate (Ozu's obsession with gloves in this movie foreshadows his fondness for motives of hands and feet later on). At the mountains, he has to chase after his skis which glide ownerless down a slope, while Watanabe enjoys some hot tea with Chieko. Ozu also gives us a first array into the cheating tactics of the student. But as charming as all of these sequences are, they remain rather plain compared with the elaborate cheating scenes in Where Now Are The Dreams of Youth?, or some of the shenanigans in I Was Born, But...
Yet, there are some elements Ozu will either abandon later on, or refine a lot. As already mentioned, in Days of Youth, Ozu fades to black to mark specific time divides. The elliptic nature of the story (we get a lot of intertitles saying "the next day", marking the passing of a significant amount of time, which we don't find a lot in subsequent films) is also something rare in Ozu's oeuvre. In two instances, he even uses a sort of time lapse, which I haven't seen again in his films. Another rarity is his use of handheld camera and the startling point of view shots during the skiing trip. Yamamoto gathers speed while he skis downhill, and Ozu cuts to a point of view shot. The camera glides down, and as Yamamoto loses his balance and falls down, the camera falls down as well and rolls through the snow. Cut to Chieko who looks down on him. Back to Yamamoto's point of view. But the image is blurry. Cut to a shot of Yamamoto laying in the snow, as he wipes snow flakes from his glasses. This bold imagery is atypical in Ozu's catalogue, but we get some remnants of it in later offerings. The swift tracking shots in and out of the apartment door in That Night's Wife, for example, or an arresting point of view shot in The Lady and the Beard: Okajima walks down the street. We cut to his point of view, a tracking shot. The camera movement halts suddenly, and only when we cut to a shot of Okajima do we know why: he has stopped his walk. Good stuff.
Days of Youth is a charming and entertaining offering that gives us a lot to analyze. Second viewing is mandatory.
0 comments:
Post a Comment