Many who see this film might be caught off guard when they see that despite being made in 1932, the film is still silent. Well, although the US had effectively made the switch in all their films by 1929, much of the world was way behind. In Japan, silents would continue well into the 1930s, so don't be put off by this--the Japanese film industry simply didn't have the equipment.

I WAS BORN, BUT... is a film by the famed director Ozu. He is much more known for his sound films (such as TOKYO STORY) as well as his trademark camera-work (such as a stationary camera placed relatively low towards the ground in scenes inside Japanese homes). While some of the same camera-work is present (the camera does not pan or turn),there were also a few scenes using a dolly to move the camera to keep up with people as they move in outdoor scenes--a relatively modern idea. Also, like most Ozu films I have seen, the story involves ordinary folk and the action is relatively muted.

The story is about two young boys who move to a new neighborhood. They have a lot of trouble because of bullies but despite a tough transition to school, the kids adore and respect their father. They think that he's a big man at work whereas in reality he's not. To make it worse, when the boys realize their father is a bit of a "brown noser", they lose faith in him. There's far more to the story than that and I really marveled at how the director managed to portray kids well. All too often, kids are over-idealized or act like miniature adults. Here, they're kids. And, in some of the scenes with the kids in the neighborhood, the film actually resembles a Little Rascals flick in many ways--with a bit of comedy thrown into the drama.

Interesting and worth seeing--especially if you compare it to Ozu's later work.

In the 30s, a low middle-class family composed of the father (Tatsuo Saito),the mother (Mitsuko Yoshikawa) and two little sons (Hideo Sugawara and Tomio Aoki) has just moved to a suburb of Tokyo. The two brothers have some sort of adaptation problem with the kids in their neighborhood, but they feel protected with their beloved father, and they become leaders of the gang of boys. Their father is a clerk in an office, and his director lives in the same neighborhood, and he tries to be promoted in his job being a servile flatterer of his boss. One night, the boys find that his father has a silly behavior in his job to please his boss, and they lose the respect for their father, questioning him why he can not be the director of the company.

This is the first movie of Yasujito Ozu that I have watched, since none of his films has been released on video or DVD in Brazil. This month, a Brazilian cable television is presenting four movies of this great director. I was really impressed with such powerful and heartbreaking fight of classes' familiar drama. I was expecting a movie like François Truffault's "Les Quatre Cents Coups", or Luis Buñuel's "Los Olvidados", or Hector Babenco's "Pixote: A Lei do Mais Fraco". However, the story is not focused in juvenile delinquents, but only low-middle class children and the specific drama of a worker's family, when the little boys do not understand the social hierarchy and why their father is not better than the father of one boy of their gang. The performance of the cast is very natural, and the direction is amazing, having an adequate pace and transmitting the sensations and feelings of the characters without sound to the viewers. My vote is ten.

Title (Brazil): "Meninos de Tóquio" ("Boys From Tokyo")

I viewed 'I Was Born, But...' (one of the outstanding titles of all time by the way) later the same day/the evening I watched Good Morning for the first time. I'm not sure if my reaction would have varied considerably if I had seen one or the other far apart, or seen this first, but I found I liked I Was Born, But even more than Good Morning. Again, this is not to say there is a tremendous quality disparity between the two works, far from it, and you can tell the same man made both films. But I think there's more depth of feeling and less of that loose focus that, while charming, is what makes Good Morning what it is.

You can tell in I Was Born, But... seeing it after the later version what was taken from where, yet at the same time it's not a remake exactly. They're cut from the same cloth, but Ozu's silent movie - not so much a comedy as it is a dramedy, of sorts - is focused much more on the children, and it's to the movie's benefit, and, naturally, the '32 film didn't (or simply couldn't) have the focus on new technology and sophisticated observations on communication. There's also the benefit of simplicity in its narrow way: we're following two brothers as they are moved to a new village by their father (played by a wonderfully laconic but tough when he needs to be Tatsuo Saito),and they have to deal with things a lot of kids have to deal with, which are fitting in to the new school, and... facing down bullies, and trying to see if they even want to go to school (late to class? eh, let's skip the whole day and eat our lunch somewhere, and get someone to forge our 'E' for Excellent grade),and then, eventually, becoming part of the group of kids after bonding over, what else, their fathers and, more specifically, who's the "best."

Ozu's film is a satire (as, also, Good Morning was),but it's more dramatic than you might expect; years ago I thought this was like an early trifle, something that had kids and was cute and got a re-release at the art-house IFC theater because of the Ozu name and didn't bother to see it. I wish I had: this is full of depth of character, but it's different than what one gets in his other films (for one thing, unlike in Good Morning, to get specific, the father *does* give one of the brothers a spanking after he's run his mouth too long and cruelly, as, well, kids sometimes do). It's clear Ozu was still finding his voice, and maybe some parts of his style from his 50's and 60's work can be seen here, but what's thrilling for me is to come to this after seeing some of those acclaimed dramas and to see a film that has a lightness of spirit while being about serious things: boys and their image of their fathers, the physicality of being a boy (the brothers never fight each other, but how they move and bounce and do things with their hands is splendid),and masculinity and one's place in a society.

At first I thought the whole movie would mostly be the boys, their this-and-that with the bullies who soon become friends with them as they bond over doing silly stuff (i.e. one of them pretends to be dead... not exactly the fart humor of Good Morning, but whatever, it works). But about halfway through the movie, there's a sequence I don't think I'll forget any time soon, where the father is with his boss at the company and some of the other employees (some may be fathers of the other kids, some not),and they're watching, after some other oddities like zebras, home-movies from at their job, doing silly things like making faces. The brothers' father does this, and suddenly things aren't amusing anymore. The father laughs with them, good naturedly, and it seems like the other kids are laughing who are there... and that makes it worse. The boys have questions for their father: why did he do that? Why is he a "nobody" at what he does despite what he tells his sons to do, which is to go to school to "Be Somebody"? Why isn't he the boss? The father tries to answer the best way he can, which is not good enough, and this leads to a tantrum from the boys, then the spanking, and then the remorse on both sides into the night.

What was before in the first half a highly enjoyable film with little pockets of depth in the observations on how boys act with one another and becoming "part" of a group, turns into something that is about class and consciousness and becoming aware of what one really does in life - it's not a coming of age story exactly, but there is that element that, by the end, the kids have grown up a little and realized not everything is as they were taught before (which they kind of guessed, but they have it confirmed by their father who, by the way, seems unlike characters I see in Ozu films usually, which I loved). It's a story that finds creative and clever ways to go about its telling of these boys coming into their own in the world they're plopped in, which is a lower-middle class (if that's what it was, it was still the depression actually even in Japan),and how they have to navigate themselves, their father, the classmates, the school, everything.