Released in 1932, Yasujiro Ozu's I was born but... is a silent film, ostensibly about children living in the Tokyo suburbs. During the year that it premiered I was born but... was listed as Japan's best film by the influential Kinema Junpo film magazine. The feature was something like Ozu's 24th movie, almost all of which have been lost. It's presently regarded as Ozu's first masterpiece, although filmed in an exuberant style that is quite different from his famous post-war family dramas. Ozu obviously liked the picture because he remade it years later. Ozu is such a strong filmmaker that we can't be sure it was his first masterpiece -- there may have been one or more silent features that preceded this picture that are masterworks. Today, no one knows.
The movie's plot is inconsequential: two brothers move with their family to the suburbs. They are bullied by a gang of neighbor kids. At first, they are afraid to attend school for fear of being humiliated and beaten up there. So they play hooky and grade their calligraphy exercises to pretend that they have earned "E's" -- that is, for "Excellence." They are found-out and ordered to attend school --in fact, their father a salaryman employed by a corporation walks them to school. At their father's workplace, rows of men scribble notes on pads of paper, answer phones, and yawn repeatedly. The work is dull but, apparently, well-paid. The big boss is eccentric, an amateur 16 mm. filmmaker who is constantly perusing rolls of celluloid with a bottle of scotch on his desk. Sometimes, the big boss gives the father a ride home in his stately black sedan. The boys who were previously bullied have now become bullies themselves and one of the kids they order around is the boss's son; he wears a black suit on which dust and dirt show when he pushed down on the ground. One evening, the boss's son invites the boys over to his home for a family movie night. The boss is screening some of his home movies. In one of them, the boy's father is featured making funny faces and grotesque gestures. Everyone laughs uproariously except the two boys. They are ashamed of their father. That night, the boys throw books around and make a mess, ostentatiously denouncing their father as a "weakling" and a "failure". After rather mildly spanking the elder boy, the old man retreats to the kitchen where he sits morosely, hunched over and smoking a cigarette tucked in the side of his mouth while drinking booze. The tempest concluded the boys fall asleep. The next morning, the boys decide to mount a hunger-strike but their mother makes rice balls, apparently something of a delicacy and the boys are tempted, succumb to temptation, and, finally, eat alongside their father. The two boys continue to mistreat the boss's son but, in the end, they become friendly with him and there is a rapprochement between the kids. In closing shots, we see the three boys with a arms around each other's shoulders walking along a dismal, unfinished suburban lane. The conflict between the boys and their father is very slight and readily resolved -- it's a mild crisis and, in hands less skillful than Ozu, the picture would simply blow away in the slightest breeze. Ozu gives the picture gravitas by his consummate framing, camera placement, and lateral tracking motions executed by his camera.
A principal character in the movie is the suburban location where the movie is shot. I know this setting from two separate sources. First, the vacant lots, half-finished construction sites, muddy lanes, and bungalows lined up on treeless avenues are all familiar to me from old Laurel and Hardy two-reelers -- many of those movies are filmed in cheerless housing tracts obviously under construction in which there are crews of pugnacious laborers, half-built houses, and empty barren places full of debris and deep puddles of water. I also know this environment from my own childhood. When I was in elementary school, the neighborhood where I lived was under construction, a wonderful playground with big vacant lots, empty fields running down to new tracts of small houses being built, mud-pits, and houses being framed and, nearby, a major construction site where big earthmovers and paving crews were building the freeway through the northern suburbs, the belt-line four-lane 694 through New Brighton. Our toys were stolen two-by-fours, shingles, buckets of nails and we spent hours digging in house-high mounds of dirt thrown up around muddy basement excavations where concrete blocks were precariously stacked on white cement footings. There were fascinating bugs, small ponds in the fields, millions of frogs and salamanders and lots of dogs roaming around. In those days, families were big, and, as in Ozu's movie, mobs of kids roamed the construction sites and the fields alternately fighting with one another and forming alliances. In Ozu's movie, the Tokyo suburbs are an uncanny wasteland through which electric street cars hustle back and forth on railroad tracks guarded by wooden gates. Utility poles are prominent in Ozu's compositions, forming long perspectives along muddy lanes. (In an early shot, we see the utility poles with one of them leaning against another, an image for the two boys but, also, education to the eye -- we are being shown that we should look closely at the patterns and alignments the poles make.) In several scenes, we see houses under construction in the background and people ride through shots on bicycles. The street cars pose an ever-present hazard -- they seem to run right through the backyard of the small house where the protagonists live. Ozu equates the monotony of salary-man work with the regimentation at school by using matching tracking shots along columns of bored office workers and school boys. The children have odd quirks. The two boys carry their lunch, wrapped in white paper, atop their hats. The kids are always placing things on each other's heads. Bullies threaten by menacingly raising a fist in the air. The adults are distracted and absent and there is a complete absence of little girls in the movie: this is a world dominated by gangs of eight and ten-year old boys. (In fact, there are very few women in the movie, just the boy's mother and one or two secretaries at the office.) The boys raid sparrow nests, crack the eggs, and slurp up their contents raw, thinking that this will give them strength. This means that ladders are always precariously leaning against houses where birds have made their nests in the gutters. Dogs are tied in the backyard, right next to the train tracks. When a bully demands subservience, he twists his fingers into a talismanic sign and his victim must immediately lie down in the dirt and, then, remain there until he is allowed to rise, this signal provided by recondite hand gestures that look a bit like a devout Catholic crossing himself. The kids are middle class, but their parents live in straitened circumstances -- on pay day, the wives are happy and the boys tell the beer deliveryman, who totes bottles of beer on his bike, that their mother will have the money to buy six bottles, thereby, earning the thanks of the delivery man who, then, intimidates one of the bullies threatening them. The movie is very slight, but probably one of the best pictures ever made about childhood and, despite its trivial content, very engaging.
