Being Two Isn't Easy

Kon Ichikawa's 1962 color film, Being Two Isn't Easy, seems like a sliver protruding from a genre to which American viewers have little access.  The movie, apparently improvised, seems to reflect norms in family dramas well-understood by the Japanese -- I wonder if it is as shapeless and strangely inconsequential when viewed within the setting of other genre films which it resembles.  I was baffled by the picture and puzzled by the fact that it seems to be a picture without a plot.  (A sort of narrative emerges in the last twenty minutes of the short 88 minute movie, but, in general, the film is self-effacing to the point of being almost invisible.)  Too dire for comedy, the film is also too whimsical to count as tragedy, although it has sad elements.  The movie isn't really funny, but it's also not exactly serious either.  It's certainly not melodramatic -- the film makes its points with such subtlety that they are scarcely apparent.  The best characterization that I can provide is that Being Two Isn't Easy is a highly realistic account of a few months in the life of a baby who reaches what we would call his first birthday at the end of the film -- in Japan, you are one when you are born, counting your first nine-months in the womb as your first year; hence, the titular two-year old is, by our way of counting, a one year old infant. 

Ichikawa's movie begins with a light show of blurred colors and the narration of the baby who speaks in a high-pitched squeaky voice, but, nonetheless, in a witty and precocious manner.  The infant, a boy named Taro, tells us that he really couldn't see too well when he was born, although later he could focus on a woman's face, a lady that he now knows to be his mother.  The film chronicles a few episodes in Taro's life, seen, more or less, from the baby's point of view.  The infant comments on these episodes.  The child's commentary is childish and not memorable at all.  I believe a similar device was used in Look Who's Talking, a film about a baby in which the narration was spoken by John Travolta -- but in that case, the gag was about the contrast between the world-wise, wise-guy narrative and the innocent-looking baby.  At first, the micro-narratives involving the infant don't really coalesce:  a little girl falls out of a window but is caught by a mailman (this is the subject of surreally calm remarks by a woman who appears for a scene and, then, disappears from the movie.)  The baby is vaccinated against childhood infectious diseases and, then, when he is thought to be suffering from chicken pox, is lugged around Tokyo by his formidable grandmother -- the old woman is doctor-shopping for someone who will give the baby "an injection", the only kind of treatment that grandma thinks effective with respect to small children.  Taro's father, a feckless salary-man, says he doesn't want another child, notwithstanding his wife's desire to get pregnant again.  Taro's mother, the beautiful and gentle Chiyo, helps her own sister give her baby a bath -- both women sweat profusely and comment on how exhausting it is to care for small children.  Another sister, a woman with 8 children, comes to see Chiyo, talks about her life which consists of nothing but pregnancy and child birth and tries to borrow 5000 yen.  Then, the family moves into the home where Goro's widowed mother lives.  At first, the two women distrust one another and seem to be enemies but they gradually bond over their view that Goro is pretty much useless as a husband and father.  Goro leaves a plastic dry-cleaning bag in the corridor and the baby puts it over his head and suffocates to the point of passing out.  Chiyo revives the baby and Goro's mother, the infant's grandma, coldly tells Goro that he should commit suicide in recompense for his negligence.  The old woman is not warm at all, but rather very fierce.  She opines that there are too many people in Japan and that most of them don't deserve to live,  heaping scorn upon a young man mentioned in the newspaper who has crashed  his motorcycle into a utility pole and died.  "So his mother took care of him and raised him up so that he could die that way?" the old woman says disdainfully.  (Before she speaks, these words we get a baffling insert of people on motorcycles roaring through the darkness -- the shot isn't explained until we see Goro's mother reading the newspaper -- this kind of editing is characteristic of the French "New Wave" and the way in which the movie is shot seems derived the French films by Truffaut, Godard, and Rivette of that era.)  The next day, the old lady reaches for a ball of thread and collapses dead.  Goro is traveling.  When he comes home, Chiyo tells him about his mother's comment about there being too many people in Japan:  "Well, she practiced what she preached," Goro says drily.  That night, a ball of thread rolls mysteriously through the house and wakes up Chiyo.   She talks to her husband wondering where the old woman has gone -- is she in some kind of heaven or just extinguished.  It's Taro's birthday and there is a full yellow moon.  Taro sees his grandmother looking down at him from the moon.  The number of candles on his cake (two) gets confused with the number of candles that would be on his grandmother's (death) day cake, a great fiery multitude.  Goro decides that maybe he would be okay with his Chiyo trying to have another baby.  Taro tells us that once he was a baby, but "now (he) is a big boy and one day will be a man."

There is a tiny plot about Goro growing up himself, something not accomplished until his own mother dies and he reluctantly consents to Chiyo having another baby.  The film seems to suggest that the events involving his son have made him into a better man or, even, have helped him to achieve something like "manhood" as that concept is constructed by the Japanese.  There is some eerie conversation about where people have been before they are born and where they go after they die -- the notion is that the child, perhaps, recalls something by his own pre-existence.  But, if Taro knows where he was before he came into existence, he doesn't say anything to illuminate this subject.  In fact, the whole device of having the baby able to narrate events involving his life revolves upon this plot point:  the characters wonder what is like not to exist and the baby, who presumably didn't exist within his own recent memory, could maybe enlighten us on this point, but he doesn't.  There is some poetic imagery involving the moon -- the baby sees a yellow banana moon (a crescent moon) which morphs in the infant's imagination into a little canoe in the sea.  (Ichikawa was a great admirer of Disney and began his career in animation and there is a little cartoon sequence in the film showing the canoe-banana-moon riding the waves and, then, swamped.)  Ichikawa is most known in this country for his harrowing war films, Fires on the Plain (involving Japanese soldiers reduced to cannibalism to survive) and The Burmese Harp ( a film about a Buddhist monk who devotes himself to gathering the bones of dead soldiers in the jungle's southeast Asia and burying them.)  It's hard to be Two couldn't be more radically different from the war films (or the sex movies) that made Ichikawa famous.  The movie is very slight and completely convincing from the standpoint of realism -- in fact, in some ways, the movie feels like a documentary.  The script is by Natto Woda, Ichikawa's wife, and I presume that it is autobiographical.