Ozu's most accomplished pre-war work. From the poignant deconstruction of working-class masculinity over the intricately composed shots and expert editing to the heartfelt performances, Passing Fancy displays everything that's great about Ozu's film making. The story follows the day laborer Kihachi and documents his troubled relationship to his son Tomio and his unrequited love to the young Harue. The story reaches two memorable climaxes. The first one is a violent fight between Kihachi and Tomio after the son confronts his father that all he does is drink and chase after women. The second one occurs when Tomio gets catarrh and Kihachi contemplates the possibility of his son dying. Both climaxes propel the movie into a different direction, thus reinforcing the episodic nature of the script.
At no point is the movie arbitrary or unfocused however. Kihachi's masculinity is scrutinized on several levels: as a father figure, as a lover, and as a provider. Needless to say that Kihachi's characterization is incredibly precise. I was struck by how much Kihachi is defined through body language. His mischievous grin when apologizing, his constant scratching and scrubbing, his reliance on violence, his frequent wardrobe changes are all inherent to his being. His posturing masks the fact that his life is not very successful. He can't seduce Harue and she falls for his best friend Jiro. He is illiterate. He is a lazy worker and thus broke. The relationship to his son is superficial at best. Amazingly however, he has an unspoiled positive attitude towards life. He accepts his condition as it is. His status in society prevents him from shaping his environment. Instead, all he can do is adapt to the changing realities. A joke crucial to the plot underlines this philosophy: why do we have five fingers?, asks Tomio. Because otherwise a hand wouldn't fit into a glove.
As it is almost customary in pre-war Ozu films, the patriarch has to leave the family in order to improve everyone's condition. But contrary to An Inn In Tokyo or Story of Floating Weeds, the film doesn't end here. We get a scene with Kahichi on a boat on his way to Hokkaido where he hopes to find work. He tells the joke of the glove to a group of men who travel with him, but one of them beats him to the punchline. He then finds a piece of paper with some calligraphy from his son, and he realizes that he misses him too much to leave him. He jumps from the boat and vows to return to Tokyo to find his son. It is interesting that from all father figures Ozu could have chosen from it is Kihachi who gets to come back to his family to start anew. Is Ozu's fondness for this type of bon vivant responsible for that, or the fact that Kihachi finally realizes that he loves his son? In other instances the fathers in question already had acted out of love for their children, but had to sacrifice even that because it wasn't enough to help their families. Here, Kihachi is more or less oblivious to his son and is reformed when he is on his way to another city.
Stylistically, Passing Fancy is astonishing. Two things struck me particularly. Ozu's sharp editing, and his shot compositions using deep focus. He experiments a lot with objects, or drapes, or sometimes people blocking some of the left or right frame, thus refining the geometry of the shot. What would later translates into Ozu's obsession with bottles and glasses in the foreground of the shot, is rendered here in relatively simple lines and angles and his use of wide-angle, deep-focus shots. His editing is superb as well. His disorienting technique is rarefied even more. We sometimes get title cards for dialogue without us knowing who is talking until the third dialogue card. Ozu simply jumps from cutaway to cutaway until he makes up his mind to show us who is actually speaking. In one scene, Tomio is drawing and we get a volley of cutaways. It is impossible to make out if they are point of view shots from Tomio's perspective or unmotivated by character, as it was customary for him to do in Tokyo Chorus already. The cuts on action are grafted as well. A lot of Kihachi's physical shenanigans actually serve as transaction between difference scenes. For example, he shakes out his shirt in one scenes, and hangs it on the wall in the next unrelated scene. Ozu thus creates a pictorial unity rarely achieved in his previous work.
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