The Brothers and Sisters of the Toda Family (1941)

☆ ☆ ☆ ½

The Brothers and Sisters of the Toda Family (1941) – Y. Ozu

The surprising thing about “Toda Family” is just how much it foreshadows Ozu’s later themes and his greatest masterpieces.  For example, the plot here depicts how a grandmother and her youngest daughter are passed from the various households of her adult children when the patriarch/grandfather has died.  None of them treat their own mother/mother-in-law with respect and she ends up living in the family’s dilapidated villa near the seaside.  Shades of Tokyo Story, right?  But although the plot feels so Ozu-like, his style has not fully congealed into what we are familiar with in his classic films of the late forties and fifties.  Yes, the camera is often seated on the tatami mat with us and people speak directly into the camera in shot-countershot patterns.  Also, Ozu’s still life shots that punctuate scenes showing nearby vistas or that show a room or hallway before or after a character enters/departs are already here (and often beautiful).  But the settings and the milieu are the dwellings of the rich (not Ozu’s usual middle class group) and the camera occasionally presents things in un-Ozu-like fashion (it is hard to explain but you will know, if you know Ozu).  Moreover, as David Bordwell has pointed out, Ozu seems to have more patriotic fervour (this is 1941) than we expect of him – the “good son” (who first seems like a neglectful rogue), played by Shin Saburi, moves to China and declares how good it is and how you can do whatever you want.  He also scolds his bourgeois brothers and sisters for their failure to work and contribute to society.  Bordwell suggests that Ozu was just trying to get along in a film industry and society dominated by censorship at the time (much as Mizoguchi did with his jidai-geki films) but it feels a little unsettling.  Ozu would find his groove after the war and reach the highest echelons of film-making.