The Ozu Collection: The Student Comedies Review

• 22nd Feb 2012

As a part of the BFI’s commitment to release all of Ozu’s 32 surviving films, contained on this double DVD are among his earliest films all of which are silent and were made between 1929 and 1932. They all belong to a genre of student comedies – a very popular genre of the time; anyone who vaguely familiar with Japanese cinema it becomes apparent that in Japan even sub-genres have sub-genres. The student comedy was one such genre of which Ozu made six such films in 1929 alone. Ozu’s last so-called student comedy was College is a Nice Place made in 1936 that is not included here nor, I believe are there any prints still in existence. What is included on this disc is also a fragment, a whole surviving 11 minutes of his 1930 film I Graduated But…. What is surprising is that Yasujiro Ozu is often seen as Japan’s most Japanese director compared to Akira Kurosawa often cited as a more westernized director. However, I have also found this curious as Kurosawa has made many films about samurai culture and codes, whereas a constant theme in Ozu’s films are the influences of western culture on modern Japanese society and the generational conflicts that this incurs. These early films defy this notion as they are clearly more American than his later films even if the generational conflicts, culture clashes and western influences are all apparent. As the authors to the accompanying 38 page booklet states it is easy to read the early films of a director’s oeuvre as emerging ideas that lead to their masterpiece(s). But these films are somewhat surprising in that they are comedies very close in style to some of those being released in silent Hollywood at the time and at first glance bare little relation to his later work but this is untrue and a misreading of Ozu’s films, personality and ideas. There are running themes streaking through all four films on this disc and all are close in style to the comedies of Harold Lloyd from the student with the Harold Lloyd glasses (stating how studious he is) to the poster for the Lloyd feature Speedy (1928) adorning the walls in a student flat in one of the films to the slapstick style in all of them or the college flags adorning walls and in the opening credits to the first two films on the disc. But it is in I Flunked But… that this is most clear in this Japanese version of Lloyd’s The Freshman (1925). However, it has to be said that Ozu is no genius at comic timing nor can he rely on a cast of inveterate comic performers like a Harold Lloyd or Buster Keaton to make these films classic and great comedies. What they do have is though is charm.

When he made Days of Youth in 1929 Ozu himself was just 25-years-old and he certainly often made films about generations he could relate to. But this too is misleading; Ozu himself never went to university or college, but he did have similar enjoyments in life, went skiing regularly (like the youngsters in Days of Youth) and went drinking and carousing with his friends so he certainly saw these people as his peers. What is also interesting about these films is the change in mood in these as they grow. There is airiness and lightness in tone in the first film (arguably the best) that descends as time goes on to the later film on the disc, the 1932 Where Now Are The Dreams of Youth? In several of the student comedies there is also an emergence of another genre as they also become social dramas in a post Wall Street Crash world as the world falls into depression with graduating students desperately seeking work and becoming disappointed in the prospects afforded to them. The second film (well the remaining 11 minutes of it), I Graduated, But… was released just weeks before the Wall Street Crash but deals with themes of struggling in search of work and find disappointment and the harsh realities of life. This is returned to again in I Flunked But and in The Lady and the Beard the search for being taken seriously is broken merely by the shaving off of a beard in a comic turn until in the final film, Where Now Are The Dreams of Youth? where many of these ideas are culminated.

These films are a rare treat to any fan not only of Ozu, but also of early cinema. Accompanying all the films is a newly written score by Ed Hughes which is at times a little intrusive, but the option comes to watch the film without the score (I call that the mute button). Ozu is best known for films such as Late Spring (1949) and Tokyo Story (1953) and nearly all his films deal with generational conflict and, more than being variations on a theme his films rather perfect a theme. And here there are certainly constants in the early films that are repeated and styled in the later better known films: Tokyo’s suburban landscapes, generational differences, westernized cultural influences and the way the films are edited. In Tokyo Story there is a key scene in which father and daughter are discussing life when the younger daughter asks her elderly father: “Isn’t life disappointing?” Here is another theme amidst the comedy, Ozu’s bitter sweet denunciation that life can be disappointing and fun in equal measure.

Chris Hick