I Was Born, But...

I
Was Born, But...

I Was Born, But... is an
utterly charming, hilarious silent comedy of childhood by Yasujiro Ozu,
displaying the lighter, more playful side of his sensibility. The film
concerns itself almost exclusively with the child's point of view,
focusing on the perspective of young brothers Keiji (Tomio Aoki) and
Ryoichi (Hideo Sugawara). The boys have just moved to a new town with
their father (Tatsuo Saito) and mother (Mitsuko Yoshikawa), since their
father has moved to the suburbs so as to be closer to his boss. The
film's genius is the way Ozu keeps unceremoniously cutting away from the
film's adult dramas — the father's desire to advance at work and make a
good impression on his boss — to follow the kids instead. It's like
there are two entirely separate worlds coexisting here. When the father
goes to visit his boss on the weekend early in the film, Ozu watches
just long enough to establish that he's doing a little sucking up,
looking obviously subservient with his stained jacket and nervous
mannerisms, and then the camera chases off after the boss' son Taro
(Seiichi Kato) as he runs away with some friends to go bully the new
boys.

These scenes have an exuberance and energy that's nearly
irresistible, as Ozu traces the way that small dramas can be of big
consequence in a child's world. Keiji and Ryoichi must adjust to their
new home, to new challenges from a bully and the gang he leads. They are
dogged, too, by their father's insistence that they do well in school,
even though they don't even want to go because of the bullies there.
When asked if they like school, the boys immediately respond, "we like
the walk there and the walk home, but in between is no fun." There's a
real sharp wit in this film, a sense of pitch-perfect comic timing
that's as present in the physical comedy as it is in the sporadic
dialogue provided by the titles. When the bullies confront the two boys,
it's staged like a dance, with each side stepping forward a little bit
at a time, hesitantly posturing for one another, the leader gliding
forward and the others behind him nervously inching up to support him or
at least to see what's going on.

Ozu has great fun with all
these scenes, enjoying the kids' mugging and goofing around, the way
they make faces and stand on one foot, try to find sparrows' eggs
because they think it'll make them stronger, and play a funny game of
raising the dead, gesturing to make a kid fall to the floor, then
crossing themselves and holding their hands out to bring him back to
"life." There are plenty of wonderful comic set pieces and characters,
like the beer delivery boy (Shoichi Kofujita) who teases the boys by
pretending he'll forge a good grade on their faked homework assignment,
then drawing a backwards character instead. Later, the boys convince the
delivery boy to help them beat up the bully who's bothering them,
because they tip him off when their mother wants to buy beer. Helping
him get a sale earns the boys his temporary loyalty, but it's not enough
to get him to also take on Taro: as he explains, Taro's family buys
much more than Keiji and Ryoichi's family. This is a first indication,
though the boys don't understand it at the time, of the concept of
social status and hierarchies.

Their understanding of
hierarchies is limited to the idea of who can beat up whom, of who's
bigger and stronger, who's tougher. They don't get that the adult world
has different priorities, that money and class dictate the separations
and relationships between people once they grow up past childhood. Once
the boys dispense with the bully, they take over leadership of the gang,
including Taro, who becomes their friend and lackey. To them, they're
equals at least, so it's puzzling to get some hints that things might be
different for their parents. This conflict comes to the fore in the
film's final third: after spending an hour dealing with light slapstick
and goofy little set pieces involving the kids, Ozu unexpectedly
introduces a note of pathos and drama when the boys see some amateur
movies of their father acting like a fool at work, making funny faces
and trying to amuse his boss. They had worshiped and respected their
father, believing him to be an important man, defending him in the usual
kids' arguments about whose father is the best. When they see these
movies, they suddenly see him in a totally different light, as a clown,
as someone who has to be obsequious with Taro's father, constantly
bowing to him. And when their father tries to explain that he is only an
employee, that Taro's father is above him in rank, the boys are only
even more devastated, understanding in a flash that the world does not
work the way they thought it did, that their father was not the "great
man" they'd thought he was.


The film's final act is moving and nuanced in
its treatment of this theme, replacing the humor of the earlier scenes
with an honest, direct look at class and honor. The father sighs that
coping with the limits of status, with settling for being just a lowly
employee, is "a problem kids these days will face all their lives,"
suggesting that he sees a future, sadly enough, where his own sons will
grow up to be just like him, cogs in the machine rather than truly
important men. He watches them sleep, with tears drying beneath their
eyes, and urges them to strive to be better, not to settle for a working
man's life and status the way he had. It's deeply affecting, to see
this man struggling with his emotions as he realizes how badly his sons'
confidence in him has been shaken. He briefly sinks into despair,
grabbing a bottle of liquor and threatening to drown his sorrow in it.
Ozu captures this low point quite effectively, framing the image with
the father leaning against the doorway in the right side of the frame,
the liquor bottle in his hand hanging down into the foreground, as his
wife sits in the center of the frame in the background. It's a wonderful
image of resignation and sadness. It is also the payoff to Ozu's
decision to stage the film so completely from the kids' perspective
prior to this: this sudden shift to the father, to his long-subdued
frustration and mild shame at his limited position in life, is striking
in its emotional impact.

There are hints of this sympathy to the
father's perspective earlier in the film, too. Ozu's editing frequently
suggests the continuity between father and sons even before the theme
comes up explicitly in the film's denouement, by drawing parallels
between the generations through juxtapositions of images. At one point,
the camera pans (a camera move much more frequent in silent Ozu than it
would be later in his career) across a row of office workers hunched
over their desks, writing. Ozu then cuts to a cluster of students at
their desks, learning calligraphy while a teacher admonishes them for
goofing around or staring off into space, and finally the camera pans
across an open field where the two kids cutting school are sprawled out,
also writing as they lie in the grass. In all three shots, the camera
move is the same, even as subtle shifts in the angle calls attention to
the cutting, preventing a smooth transition from one shot to the next.
It is purposefully disjunctive and jarring, suggesting both that the
generations are linked by similar behaviors and situations, and yet that
there is some necessary break, some trauma, that leads from childhood
to adulthood. That break, perhaps, is the children's later realization
of their father's place in the social strata.

Ozu chronicles the
changing relationship between father and sons throughout the film by
returning several times to a particular primal scene, the father and the
two boys leaving the house together in the mornings, walking together
as far as a train crossing before splitting up, the boys going off to
school and the father to work. When this scene recurs at the end of the
film, after the boys have started to come to terms with their father's
place in the world, it mirrors the earlier ones, in which the boys had
unquestioned respect for their father. But there's a new emotional
undercurrent here, a hint of hesitancy that's cleared up when the boys
give their father permission to go greet his boss, confirming that they
now understand and have once again gained respect for him, albeit a new,
more realistic respect, one founded on simple love rather than a
mistaken belief in the father as an idealized "great man." It is a
poignant and warm ending to a wonderful film in which Ozu
affectionately, sensitively explores the nature of familial bonds and
the role of honor in a new world where social class is calcifying into a
rigid hierarchy.