Tokyo Chorus

Tokyo Chorus is an early
pre-war silent film from Yasujiro Ozu, whose silent work generally
reveals quite a different director from the later static, patient
sensibility of his mature oeuvre. Of course, there is still a continuity
in terms of themes and subjects connecting these earlier silents to the
sound films. Tokyo Chorus is, like almost all of Ozu's films,
concerned with domesticity and family relationships, and with the
changes wrought on the family by outside pressures and developments. In
Ozu's post-war films, these pressures take the form of encroaching
Westernization, of the old traditional ways transitioning into a new
modern sensibility. Obviously, there are some slightly different
concerns at the core of this pre-war film, made in 1931 with the Great
Depression affecting Japan as much as any other country — as one
character jokes early on, "Hoover's policies haven't helped us yet," a
wry punchline made even more bitterly ironic by the retrospective
knowledge that Hoover's policies didn't help anyone very much.

The
film centers on one family struggling to make ends meet during this
difficult economic time. Shinji (Tokihiko Okada) is introduced as a
rebellious, goofy schoolboy, but a few years later he has a family: a
wife (Emiko Yagumo), a son (Hideo Sugawara), a daughter (Hideko
Takamine) and a baby. Ozu introduces Shinji in a lengthy and
near-slapstick sequence as a stern school teacher (Tatsuo Saito) tries
to maintain control over a rowdy line of students (though, admittedly,
the fact that all these schoolboys look like grown men initially makes
it hard for an outsider to figure out the context of this scene). Ozu
pans across the line of students, his camera moving across a diagonal
composition that is repeated several times throughout the film. Such
motion would later become rare and uncharacteristic in Ozu's post-war
work, but here his aesthetic is not pinned down to the static,
low-height observation that would come to be his most salient visual
characteristic. Instead, Ozu's camera tracks along with the characters
as they walk, or passes along rows of people lining a street.

During
the opening scene, Shinji and the other students goof around and play,
as the instructor makes disapproving notes in a little book, calling
them out to examine their outfits and their posture. Shinji gets in
trouble for not having a shirt on under his jacket, and is left sitting
alone, picking at something (bugs? stray threads?) on his pants as the
rest of the students are led away. This introduction establishes the
film's broad sense of humor, telegraphed through the loping gait of the
students as they act surly towards the teacher, or the instructor's
head-bobbing bounce as he surveys them. From this opening, Ozu cuts away
to a few years later, when Shinji is working at an insurance company.
It is not stated directly, but the gap is meant to represent the onset
of maturity, the rowdy schoolboy gaining responsibility as he settles
into life with a family and a respectable office job.


This stability is disrupted when Shinji loses
his job after defending an older employee who he felt had been unfairly
fired: his earlier insouciance towards authority manifesting itself
again in an act of benevolent defiance. The scene is nearly played for
comedy — Shinji and his boss get into a slowly escalating shoving match
by tapping each other on the shoulder with fans — but there's no mistake
that the consequences of this lost job are truly dire for a man with a
wife and three children in the middle of a terrible depression, with no
jobs available. The central theme of the film is this man's struggle to
maintain his family's honor and his own self-respect when faced with the
loss of his profession and, with it, his claim to respectability. Honor
is central to the film, especially as expressed in the way that
Shinji's wife looks at him; Ozu captures the impact of a look, the
humiliation of seeing her husband in a menial job that is beneath his
station, a job he only got because of a chance encounter with his
sympathetic former teacher.

What's interesting, though, is that
Ozu ultimately critiques, in his own indirect way, the concepts of honor
expressed here. Shinji's wife at first resists her husband "stooping"
to a job carrying banners to advertise his former teacher's new
restaurant; when she sees him doing this, she is humiliated. In fact,
it's a rare moment when Ozu reinforces her feelings with an intertitle
that outright says she's humiliated; Ozu generally uses such titles
sparingly, preferring to capture such emotional nuances in the actors'
performances, using the editing to emphasize certain glances and
expressions. This, apparently, was a beat that Ozu felt the need to
hammer home more forcefully, however, hitting his audience over the head
rather than risk anyone missing the wife's sense of disgrace. She tells
Shinji that he should remain proud and not do anything so obviously
beneath his status. But Shinji resists, insisting that he is doing the
right thing, that all a man in his situation can do is take whatever
opportunities come to him. His wife soon gives way as well, agreeing to
help him in his new job and supporting him until, at the end, his former
teacher comes through with an offer of a better job in education. The
lesson seems to be that abstract concepts like honor and pride are not
nearly as important as putting food on the table for one's family, just
as keeping up appearances must be secondary to providing the necessities
of life for one's loved ones.

Tokyo Chorus is a fine
film if not a particularly distinguished one. It reveals Ozu's nascent
sensibility in its earliest state, as he deals with his usual themes —
family dramas, the conflict between traditional values and changing
conditions, the rhythms of domestic life — in a less formally rigorous
way than he would in later years. The film is unfailingly direct and
straightforward in its approach, telling a simple story simply. It is
thus not quite a peak Ozu film, but perhaps an important work in his
development, a step towards the greater depth and aesthetic richness of
his later films. It is, regardless, an affecting film, particularly in
two scenes between Shinji and his teacher. In the first, when the
teacher offers Shinji a job, the latter offers some token resistance
based on honor, saying that if the teacher merely feels pity for him,
then he can't accept, but that if it's a gesture of friendship instead,
he can. Shinji is essentially constructing a way for him to take the job
and still feel like he's not sacrificing his honor; Ozu captures the
desperate yearning on Shinji's face as he fears that perhaps his teacher
will withdraw the offer, and the knowing nod from the teacher as he
accepts this face-saving gesture. Later, in the final scene, Shinji's
former classmates have gathered together for a reunion, and are singing a
song together. Shinji and the teacher both join in, but as Ozu cuts
between closeups of the two of them, isolating them within the crowd,
their faces are troubled briefly by sadness and introspection before
they regain their composure and join the celebration. Even in a
relatively straightforward and conventional film like this, Ozu asserts
his mastery with shots like these, shots where complicated emotions
arise from his probing of the faces of his actors, and the
juxtapositions between uplift and loss that flow through this film.