This article, along with many others, was greatly delayed by my obligations as a result of my younger brother's very serious illness. It's an odd coincidence that my first entry back in Cinema Ozu focuses primarily on a pair of brothers. It's more bizarre for me that I'm covering a movie about a mother giving everything for her adult son on the same day that my brother starts chemo.

It's difficult to evaluate this movie, since the opening and closing ten minutes or so (respectively) have been lost. I would compare this to eating a peanut butter and jelly sandwich with most of the bread shaved off. You still get the middle hunk, but it's impossibly awkward without some foundation.

"Kihachi" (Takeshi Sakamoto) in a cameo as a janitor.

The movie opens with a fairly affluent family eating breakfast: a father (Iwata Yukichi), a mother named Chieko (Mitsuko Yoshikawa), and two young brothers (Den Okikata and I Was Born, But...'s Seiichi Kato). They plan a family trip before going their separate ways for the day, but the father abruptly dies midday. Years pass. One of the brothers discovers that he is actually the son of a different woman, his father's first wife. He refuses his stepmother's comfort and keeps the news from his stepbrother. Chieko's son resents the pronounced amount of preferred treatment that he perceives "his brother" to receive. The stepson resents it because he knows that she is trying to overcompensate.

The brothers as adults.

The stepson holes up at a brothel in Yokohama with a prostitute named Mitsuko (Yumeko Aizome). They fight. He goes back to his stepmother's house and starts an argument so that she will show more favor to his stepbrother. She does, the stepson leaves, and then Chieko tells her biological son the truth. The son is wracked with remorse. The mother goes to the brothel to plead once again with her adopted but no less loved stepson, but he pushes her away. The brothel's maid (Choko Iida) invokes the title, insisting that "a mother should be loved". Boy, will Iida herself prove that point a couple of years later in The Only Son. The stepson, in turn, is wracked with guilt. He goes back to his stepmother's house once again, everyone makes nice, and they all move to the suburbs together three years later.

The now commonplace Ozu nod to Hollywood

Ozu himself later acknowledged that the basis of the story (the disintegration of an affluent family) was more interesting than the intrusive "B" story he plugged in about the "brotherly" rivalry. As Bordwell notes, it's tough to really put together a verdict when you can't see two crucial sections. The first is, of course, the introduction to the family at the beginning and the second is the resolution and ending that presumably explains why there's a "three years later" coda.

Even imagining as much as I can into the narrative, A Mother Should Be Loved didn't do much for me. The most effective or interesting piece of it was Mitsuko Yoshikawa playing the extra put-upon mother, Chieko. As I alluded to in the synopsis, she has nothing on Choko Iida's performance in The Only Son, which ranks for me as one of the most powerful "mother" performances I've seen in Ozu or elsewhere. In some respects, one could see Ozu clipping off the bare element of this movie and from that, up sprouted The Only Son. He took a mother trying to do right by her adult son seen, as seen in this movie, and focused on the complexity inside that relationship. I'll have more on that movie sometime before its release on Tuesday, hopefully.

Hope for a Region1 DVD: Like other fragmented or partially-lost Ozu films, this one is an odd duck. It can't really be released on its own, nor would it seem to naturally fit the Eclipse line due to inherently needing some amount of context best afforded by supplements.

Up next is the Ozu silent classic (later remade) that would be Kihachi's second of four starring appearances. I discussed it two weeks ago with the CriterionCast guys and will link that chat up in the next installment.

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.