Exotic, Universal, Silent - Ozu's I Was Born, But...

Because it's Ozu, you know that one way another, even though it's a silent film (!) and probably 70 years old and a grain print and outdated in many ways - it's got to be at least worth watching once, and so it is with Ozu's "I was Born, But..." (great title!). Not a great movie but a valuable curiosity, both for its exoticism and its universality. Exotic: Japan in the 20s/30s looks almost like another planet, the suburbs (of Tokyo?) abject rural poverty, without even roads, just ruts for cars to go through, houses and buildings appearing randomly with no planning, like a spreading blight, yet families trying to make their lives clean and tidy - a picket fence and a doghouse, in the middle of nowhere! - and everywhere a chaos of poles and electrical wires overhead and most of all the trains, single cars, going back and forth all the time like a mechanical heartbeat, Ozu's true signature. As to the story, a sad and touching one of a family moving to the suburb, the two young boys having to fend off bullies at school, with no protection or sympathy from the parents who are only concerned about showing respect for the factory boss, a wealthy phony. The boys ultimately see through the dad and his pretensions and tell him he's a total failure, the family near breakdown, but then the boys realize dad is the best he can be, and there's a sweet reconciliation at the end - not a Hollywoodish thing where Dad would do something heroic, but just a quiet, unspoken understanding. By today's standards, the story is slow and the somewhat stagy - but still far, far ahead of so many other stilted silents - some beautiful shots of the family gatherings, of the boys in the landscape, of the father walking the boys to school. You can see the beginning of Ozu's sensibility - which will culminate in Tokyo Story - but he was a director with all the skills but yearning for dialog.