In a succession of shots inside a silk factory showing the long piston-like production lines and the bits and pieces of a mechanical world, the parameters of O-Tsune’s own world become apparent: it is that of an endless toiling so that her son, the young and prepubescent Ryosuke, can finish up his elementary education and they can both live unperturbed in their scrimping and meager existence in the small, homey, rural town of Shinsü. But one evening, while working in the house, O-Tsune hears from her son that he has been asked at school whether he plans to continue with his education, going to high school and from there even to university; he tells her that he has said no, that he won’t be going, and the two agree that with their means any prospects of an education would be impracticable.
Then one of Ryosuke’s teachers stops by and informs the mother that her son has said he’ll be continuing his education with high school, and mentions by the by that he’s pleased that Ryosuke takes his education seriously, since so much in life depends on education; cowed into a silence at once respectful and outraged, O-Tsune listens and agrees tacitly that her son will go to high school. Then she slaps her son…thinks it over for a couple days…and at last agrees to take on the herculean servitude of more hours at the silk factory so that he can have an education. A few evenings after the first, they make a pact and the son tearfully vows to honor her sacrifice, working to become a man of whom his mother can be proud.
But thirteen years later, everything has changed: Ryosuke works in a night school and lives in moderate penury with a wife and child he never tells his mother about, at least until she comes to visit the Tokyo exurb where he lives—a bottom-of-the-barrel neighborhood just a stone’s throw from the towering smokestacks of the municipal incinerator.
In The Only Son, its simultaneous grace and merciless upholding of the rift between tradition and modernity—a constant theme of any Ozu film—is equal in power to that of the most mordant satire looking at how modern life can corrode the spirit of the human being, but this balance is never as pessimistic as the satire, and never as scornful. Like his other films, The Only Son shows the resigned nobility and the faithless love in which Ozu somehow found the ideal expression of a worldview, a philosophy, and an affirmation of life; it lets us look at things without deriding them, showing the effects of the passage of time that, in any case, would have created changes devastating to the family and to its traditions.
It is not modernity as such but life itself, the longer view of our condition, that causes this kind of pain, and it can’t be escaped. To resign oneself to life and to love in spite of those things, to give up by affirming, is the conclusion of attitude with which Ozu directed all his films. It certainly has its problems as an attitude, as a philosophical position, but this is art rather than philosophy; one can argue with the conclusions of these films, as with those of any film, but not with their majesty and their execution and their sheer authenticity, which are the qualities that make Ozu’s films works of art.
And what exactly is The Only Son? Like every other film of this director’s cohesive and manifold body of work, it is a resigned look at sadness and hope and their cyclical eternity—which it gives us plenty of room to discover.
