Retro Review by Zach Dennis
A well of the way into Yasujiro Ozu’s 1942 film, There Was a Father, we have a scene that aficionados of the Ozu hits may recognize. On the same frequency as similar scenes in Tokyo Story and Late Spring, Shuhei (Chishû Ryû) scolds his son for the notion that he would come to Tokyo and live with his father. His son, Ryohei (Shûji Sano) has had an absent father for the majority of his life after the patriarch uprooted the boy following an unfortunate accident that left a student dead at the school Shuhei was teaching at.
The moment left Shuhei scarred — closing off himself from the world and isolating his entire being into work; nothing else. Since that moment, Ryohei has tried to find some way to bring his father back on sturdy ground.
Ozu shoots a scene between the young Ryohei and Shuhei as the two fish in a stream near their home following the abrupt job change. It’s quiet and peaceful as one would expect from an Ozu film, but shifts the path just a bit as we find ourselves intertwined with the stoicism of the pastoral sequence (reminiscent of the calm before the storm mentality of Kurosawa’s Only Regret for Our Youth) but also caught up in the unsaid, unbridled emotions of the two men photographed in the scene.
For Ryohei, it is a respite with his father — a quiet moment to connect and feel a kinship to this person.
This inability to connect the true emotion is in tune with the time period that Ozu made the film; in the twilight of the war, as Japan tried to identify itself in the fallout from the defeat. It seems like Ozu is speaking to that angst through Shuhei, who frequently speaks of the enjoyment he gets with spending time with his son but is all too consumed with trying to do his best to provide a comfortable living for the boy.
As Ryohei grows older, the mantra has continued to be instilled in the aging Shuhei and the residuals have affected his offspring. In one scene, a couple of Ryohei’s students come to him at the technical school he is teaching at. One of the boys wants to return home to see his family after the birth of a sibling. Ryohei rejects the offer, presenting a small speech on the differences in lives that parents and their offspring have, and how this current separation is an example of that.
The scene is played in the normal Ozu manner, but feels cold and heartless. It fills with even more despair when we witness the scene between the sons and father alluded to before. The most closely associated sequence (of my Ozu knowledge) comes from the important scene of Late Spring when Noriko (Setsuko Hara) speaks to her father, Shukichi (also Ryû) about her satisfaction with just living her life with him. She recounts how she is more than happy to continue living the simple existence along her father, and that she will marry if he believes that’s what needs to happen but disagrees that it is the unquestioned path forward for her.
Much like his character in Late Spring, Ryû as Shuhei responds to the scene by brushing off the sentiment and affirming the decision to “move ahead” in the character’s life. But the return is much more firm in There Was a Father, feeling almost more akin to an unrequited outburst than a calculated response to the child’s query.
In the sequence, Shuhei returns Ryohei’s sentiment with an almost instructive tone, attempting to remind his son of the position he is placing the both of them in if he wants to continue with the fantasy of breaking out of the mechanism that they’re both forced into. As if speaking as post-war Japan, Shuhei scolds his son with the lesson that personal emotion is out of place in this new world, replaced by the drive to work and show value in your life through your labor.
In an almost scared tone, Shuhei reminds us that we’re not in charge of our destiny anymore.
There Was a Father doesn’t have the bravado or scope of some of the masterworks of Ozu, but feels like a dry run of his future lessons on a different canvas.
As mentioned before, There Was a Father carries a pastoral setting, and much like the Kurosawa film mentioned before, has this nostalgia for a pre-war naiveté. Much like the other Japanese master, Ozu finds a small oasis among the modern angst to remember another time, though with the foresight of the wisdom of years to guide him.