The Only Son, a 1936 Japanese film, tells a story about a mother who raise her son with good education but later find out about her son’s disappointing life in Tokyo. This film is directed by Yasujiro Ozu, a famous Japanese director who is known for extremely rigorous and mysterious style in directing. Just like Ozu’s other films, his intrinsic norms has played an important role in the Only Son. His unique style has made effective contributions to the film in three main aspects: creating aesthetic feelings, triggering audience’s emotion and reflecting the main theme of the movie.
Firstly, Ozu’s unique style is used to give aesthetic feelingsto the audience, which makes the film enjoyable and easy to understand. Ozu is pretty strict about the composition in the Only Son. By having the same shooting angle and the solid arrangement of framing, he tries to create pleasing composition in each individual shot. Especially when the characters are sitting in a room. The composition is often in a rather perfect symmetry: all the decorations are hyper situated in their place, vertical straight lines are created by doors and windows in the background, framing the actors in the middle of the camera. The rigorous style of composition has created the beauty of balance for the audience and increased their aesthetic feelings. Since the composition is well organized, audience are able to do detail observations to the scene and find out the slight changes between shots, which makes the film more understandable.
Secondly, Ozu’s unique style of directing has strongly triggered and shaped the emotion of his audience. Although some may argue that Ozu’s film barely brings emotional impact because his actors seldom show enormous mood swings or act dramatically. However, my opinion is quite the opposite. Personally, I think that the restrained performance style in the Only Sonis a great way to arouse audience’s emotion and sympathy. For instance, when the mother is complaining to her son about the hardships she has suffered in the middle of the night, she does not cry out loud or act dramatically, instead, she was sobbing quietly. The introverted way of acting of the mother has arouse my feelings of frustration and helplessness. It seems that she is holding her emotion for a really long time but this time she finally lost control. And her acting has given me the exact same feeling. However, if the mother cry out loud dramatically at this point, the emotion power will be too strong that it may make the audience feel mad instead of sad. And that is not the appropriate emotion for a film that is talking about family love. Also, the calm and slow pace of shooting style in the Only Son has left me a lot of space to think about and to feel the emotion in the characters’ position.
Lastly, the unique style of Ozu has given many contributions in reflecting the main theme in the Only Son. The main theme of the film is about family and the relationship between mother and her son. It’s a very common theme that we all come across every day. Most of our everyday life are simple, plain or even pretty dull sometimes. And Ozu’s “pure” style of directing keep a good consistency to people’s real situation. For example, when the family is having noodles together, Ozu does not use any reframing or any complicated editing at this part. The shots are shifted between the mother and the son metrically while they are talking, keeping a calm and peaceful pacing. The way the actors talk is also keeping a rather slow speed. It’s obvious that Ozu’s narration of telling this story is very down to earth and it match the tune of our everyday normal life.
In conclusion, Ozu’s unique style of directing is significant to the Only Sonin terms of give aesthetic feelings, drawing audience’s emotion and expressing the main theme. His use of an extremely rigorous and mysterious style has made his film tightly related to its audience and the theme.
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