About/Contact Archives Twitter

Cinema Ozu (7b): Flunked Significance

[This installment, the one coming shortly, and a smattering of others were delayed and partially rewritten due to Movable Type issues. My apologies.]

I put together a mini-tease for this title, intending to revisit it once I could get my eyes on it. In case that never happens, I felt it necessary to get these thoughts, based on Bordwell's writing, out there. The movie starred Tatsuo Saito (once again) as a student who tries to cheat on his exams by writing the answers on his shirttails. He is confounded by his landlady, who sends the shirt off to be washed.

In addition to including the first notable role for Chishu Ryu, I Flunked, But... also marks a turning point in Ozu's development as a visual comedian. According to Bordwell, as Lubitschian or Lloydian as elements are here, the complexity of sight gags and situational comedy attain their own distinctive flavor. In particular, Ozu really forges his own particular odd way of misleading the audience.

A guy who flunks his exams tests the sharpness of his scissors against his neck and then turns away from the camera. "How did this suicidal, post-millenial kid get time-traveled back to the 1930's?" one would think. Ozu quickly cuts to a reverse angle revealing the kid is just cutting his toenails.

Again according to Bordwell, Ozu really layers in some nice bits of juxtaposition here as well. Much of the comedy is intellectual and analytical in this respect. Would you belly-laugh at most of the humor here? Absolutely not! This is finely-apportioned "heh-heh" stuff. The comedy is also tinged with melancholic failure, emphasizing how hopeless it is to challenge the insurmountable establishment. You just have to move on with what you've got.

In just a bit, we'll look at a run of three completely lost Ozu features that came after That Night's Wife.

Cinema Ozu is a limited-run series of articles about the career and impact of Japanese filmmaker Yasujiro Ozu. My primary intent is to chronicle my own journey through his films, a fair number of which I have seen, but even more of which I have not. The most essential research tools I have used are David Bordwell's book Ozu and the Poetics of Cinema and definitive Ozu fansite "Ozu-san".

The series is also timed to celebrate the July 2010 U.S. release of The Only Son and There Was a Father as a DVD double-set by The Criterion Collection. You can find all entries in Cinema Ozu here. New to the series? It's best to start from the beginning.