Ozu’s I Was Born, But… is a silent film that hardly
feels like it, its characters and interactions and subtexts established as
fully as in any of his sound films. It focuses primarily on two boys who move
to a new neighborhood and establish themselves among the other local kids, a
process depicted here as largely a grabbing of raw symbolic power, such that
you can direct other kids to lie on the ground and they’ll go along with it.
It’s inherent in this game that one should also lay claim to having the best
father, but a home movie night at the boss’s house damages their reflexive
belief in this assertion, by showing him clowning around to win favour, insulting
their intuitive sense of how power and stature should manifest itself. At home
later on, they rail at him and even go on hunger strike, and after the initial anger,
he concedes to his wife that he essentially agrees with them, and even takes a
form of pride in their rebuke, and a resulting optimism for their future (later
works, of course, will chart in detail the many compromises and disappointments
likely to await them). The film is unmistakably Ozu’s, but with a
neo-realist-before-the-fact feeling to the observation of the boys and their
stark-looking environment. Among other secondary pleasures, it’s one of
train-loving Ozu’s most train-heavy scenes, the house’s location next to the
tracks allowing them to pass by at what seems like very frequent intervals, and
one of those in which he seems most in love with movies themselves – the home
movie viewing providing much easy pleasures (lions and zebras photographed at
the zoo) and traps (the boss’s embarrassment as his wife gets confronted with evidence
of her husband walking in the street with two women, neither of which is her –
that’s the only faint appearance that sex makes in the movie though).
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