Not Coming to a Theater Near You

The Brothers and Sisters of the Toda Family / Todake no kyodai / Japan / 1941

Ozu’s social/political conservatism can be something of a barrier, but at least it’s to his credit that this conservatism evolved with the times. So, in 1937 the role of the young female character in What Did The Lady Forget? is to teach the male protagonist the virtues of slapping his stroppy wife, but twenty years later in Equinox Flower it is to teach the paterfamilias how he must accept his daughter’s own choice of a husband, rather than insist on an arranged marriage. Shin Saburi, the actor playing Equinox Flower’s father, turns up as the initially feckless younger son in Toda Family, and one of the fascinations of the film is the glimpses of actors whose faces are more familiar as their older selves in the more famous Ozu classics of the fifties.

But Toda Family truly reflects the time of its making, a product of Japanese militarism’s wartime propaganda — but one which never mentions the war, although China is bizarrely offered as a destination for the morally pure characters to escape to. The best part of the film is the middle section, depicting with humour and understanding the way the widowed mother and younger daughter and shunted from one family household to another. It clearly looks forward to aspects of Tokyo Story.

The moralism of Shojiro’s attack on his siblings is too narrow in conception and is one that a modern audience is resistant to. And it seems that the ideological weight was too much for Ozu himself. The final section collapses into an arranged-marriage comedy, with Shojiro in the very last shot literally running down a beach away from us and the film.

by Ian Johnston | Source: Panorama DVD
06 Mar 2006 12:20 PM | Comments (1)

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1. leo / 6 March 2006 / 9:30 AM / URL

   This last shot of the perennial (though rather fey) bachelor is as tantalizingly close to a self-portrait as we have in Ozu, and by extension it’s rather fun to think of Ozu as a similarly withdrawn and moralistic observer. It is not surprising that there are few male characters of a similar age after this film, suggesting both Ozu’s further withdrawal and the evacuation or emasculation of the Japanese male following the war.

   This shot is also nearly identical (in composition and meaning) to one of Setsuko Hara in Early Summer.