Passing Fancy (1933)
Directed by Yasujirô Ozu

Film Review

With his jaunty college comedies behind him, Yasujirô Ozu turned his attention to the tribulations of the working poor and that mainstay of Japanese society, the family.  Ozu's own experience of family life as a child had been far from idyllic, and for much of his childhood (from the age of ten) he was separated from his father.  He never married and lived the life of a contented bachelor, and so it seems peculiar that family life should be the thing that most preoccupied him in his professional life.  In many of Ozu's films, particularly in the first half of his career, the families he portrays are far from ideal, in some cases downright dysfunctional, with relations between parents and their offspring stretched almost to breaking point.  Passing Fancy (a.k.a. Dekigokoro) is a case in point, a film that focuses on what was for Ozu the most problematic of relationships, that of a father and his son.

The father-son relationship is rarely a thing of harmony in Ozu's films, and the ambivalence of the director's own relationship to his father can be felt in each of these films.  I Was Born, But... (1932), A Story of Floating Weeds (1934) and There Was a Father (1942), along with Passing Fancy, offer variations on a similar theme - a father's inability to live up to his son's expectations and the gulf that inevitably ensues.  Of these four films, Passing Fancy is perhaps the most optimistic, as the film ends with the father being unable to accept being separated from his son, preferring a future of self-inflicted hardship and humiliation to the prospect of losing the one thing that matters to him.  But even in this film, which is much lighter in tone than much of Ozu's work from this time onwards, the strained nature of the relationship between father and son is more than evident.  Even though he is barely ten years old, little Tomio already despises his father for being a drunken, uneducated slob.  The father, Kihachi, is fully aware of his son's contempt for him, but seems unwilling to change, and shows a total lack of parental responsibility, using his son as a punch-bag one minute, spoiling him rotten the next.

Passing Fancy was the 30th film that Ozu completed and already the director seems to have reached the threshold of his mature phase.  Most of the stylistic touches that we associate with Ozu are in place - the low camera angles, the placing of inanimate objects in the foreground and the use of pillow shots (the juxtaposition of water towers and clotheslines suggests a country that is still torn between its feudal past and industrialised future) to punctuate the narrative - and the meticulous shot composition and editing reveal a director who has mastered his art.  This film won Ozu the Kinema Junpo Award for best film, the second time he won the award, and marks a clear departure from his earlier work, which is more visibly influenced by American cinema.  That said, it is worth noting that the plot of Passing Fancy owes a great deal to King Vidor's The Champ (1931) and John Ford's Three Bad Men (1926), and Ozu continues to credit himself as a screenwriter under the (westernised) pseudonym James Maki.

Passing Fancy exhibits the diptych structure that is a quirk of most of Ozu's silent films, a dramatic second half following a comedic first half (confirming Chaplin's assertion that comedy is merely tragedy viewed from a distance).  The film begins with Kihachi, a middle-aged widower, humorously attempting to rejuvenate himself as he goes chasing after a pretty woman who is young enough to be his daughter.  When Kihachi realises the futility of this amorous escapade, the dramatic focus shifts to the relationship between the father and son, and this is where the tone of the film suddenly changes.  Unable to endure his son's rejection of him after the collapse of his romantic dreams, Kihachi lunges out at his little boy.  It is one of the most shocking moments in Ozu's oeuvre, but what is even more surprising is what follows.  Shamed by his brutality, the father sinks into pathetic immobility and allows his son to pummel him, paying him back, blow for blow.  The sight of a broken-down father realising that he can never gain his son's love is unbearably poignant.

What makes this sequence (and the film in general) so powerful are the remarkable performances from the actors playing the forever estranged father and son, Takeshi Sakamoto and Tomio Aoki.   Sakamoto was one of Ozu's favourite actors and appeared in seventeen of his films, including four in which he played a character named Kihachi.  Aoki had become an overnight star at the age of six through his appearance in Ozu's hilarious comedy A Straightforward Boy (1929) and would also appear in many of the director's films, credited as Tokkan Kozo (meaning 'boy who charges about').  Not only do Sakamoto and Aoki both have an incredibly strong screen presence, they are also exceptionally gifted actors, each capable of making us roar with laughter and flooding our tear ducts, depending on whether Ozu is in a comedic or tragic frame of mind.

One of the finest character actors in Japanese cinema, Takeshi Sakamoto is at his best in Ozu's films, whether he is playing a boisterous loveable rogue as in Passing Fancy or an inwardly tormented soul as in A Story of Floating Weeds.  Habitually rude and abrasive on screen, Aoki is a welcome antidote to all those dewy-eyed angelic kid actors that are bred especially for American cinema - the energetic brats he played for Ozu are far nearer to the kind of children we meet in real life than almost anything to be found in Hollywood.  But whilst he has more than a touch of the demonic proto-psychopath about him, the young Aoki never quite manages to conceal a child's vulnerability, and he still manages to be adorable, despite his gratuitous face pulling and the sadistic torture he inflicts on any grown-ups who are unfortunate enough to get in his path...

Film Synopsis

Kihachi and Jiro are two brewery workers living in a slum district of Tokyo.  A widower, Kihachi has a young son, Tomio, who is ashamed of his father for being poor and illiterate.  One day, Kihachi encounters a homeless young woman, Harue, and takes an instant liking to her.  He places her in the care of a woman friend, a restaurant owner named Otome, and attempts to smarten himself up in the hope that she will want to marry him.  Otome advises Kihachi that Jiro would make a far more suitable husband, but it soon becomes evident that Jiro has no interest in Harue.  After a violent argument with his son, Kihachi tries to patch things up by giving him fifty sen.  The little boy promptly spends all of the money on sweets and ends up dangerously ill with enteritis.  Realising that Kihachi cannot afford his son's medical treatment, Jiro borrows some money from a barber friend, intending to pay back the loan by working as a labourer in Hokkaido.  When he hears of this, Kihachi takes Jiro's place on the boat for Hokkaido, but has a last minute change of heart...