While having the privileged importance of being great director Yasujiro Ozu's first sound film, The Only Son also remains important for its emergence as the first truly "Ozu" work, in the sense that the very particular cinematic and thematic elements which make up what he is best known for coalesce together in a thoroughly emotional experience.
The story is simple enough, as Ozu usually tells. A widow attempts to save enough money for her son to go to college in Tokyo. She visits him years later, only to discover that he is not living the kind of sophisticated, well-off life she believed he would lead as a result of a college degree. What Ozu does with these characters is astonishing; he shows them in the most serene and simple of situations and settings yet uses his unique directing style to elicit subtle feelings and thoughts simmering just below the surface.
What this seems to suggest is Ozu's feelings regarding Japan in the 1930s, a tumultuous period in which the age of modernization seemed to be waning and Japanese society continued to be pressured into a militaristic hegemony. Clearly, Ozu resisted these transitions and his best offense was the films he made. The result is a quiet, gentle yet intense story about simple people wishing their lives, or the lives of their children, were better than they are. Through this, Ozu seems to reflect on the failure of Japanese innovation up to that point and the uncertainty of what the future might bring. Fortunately for the viewer, his specific style and insight remain as coherent and profound as ever.
The story is simple enough, as Ozu usually tells. A widow attempts to save enough money for her son to go to college in Tokyo. She visits him years later, only to discover that he is not living the kind of sophisticated, well-off life she believed he would lead as a result of a college degree. What Ozu does with these characters is astonishing; he shows them in the most serene and simple of situations and settings yet uses his unique directing style to elicit subtle feelings and thoughts simmering just below the surface.
What this seems to suggest is Ozu's feelings regarding Japan in the 1930s, a tumultuous period in which the age of modernization seemed to be waning and Japanese society continued to be pressured into a militaristic hegemony. Clearly, Ozu resisted these transitions and his best offense was the films he made. The result is a quiet, gentle yet intense story about simple people wishing their lives, or the lives of their children, were better than they are. Through this, Ozu seems to reflect on the failure of Japanese innovation up to that point and the uncertainty of what the future might bring. Fortunately for the viewer, his specific style and insight remain as coherent and profound as ever.