The Record of a Tenement Gentleman

Posted on 2008/06/22 19:07:48 (June 2008).

[Tuesday 17th June]
Chie came to my office for dinner, and after that we headed back home for a quiet night in - what with Chie having a couple of work nights out planned this week, and me planning to be away at Simon's stag do for the weekend, it was important to have some "quality time" together tonight.

So we decided to watch a film - another Ozu DVD Chie had recently received from Love Film. Tonight's feature was "Nagaya shinshiroku" which apparently translates to "The Record of a Tenement Gentleman" (although I didn't really understand this title, as the main characters were an old lady and a young boy).

It was shot in 1947, which makes it the earliest Ozu film we've seen so far, and I was quite surprised to learn that Japan was even making films this soon after the war. Whilst there are a few references to life in post-war Japan (the difficultuy of buying things, the family people lost in the war, etc), it's not really a story purely about that, but still for me it was a fascinating insight into what life was like at that time. Whenever it comes to the war and Japan, all we ever hear about in the West is kamikaze pilots, appalling massacres, terrible treatment of PoWs and so on. This has, of course, always been very much at odds with the people for whom I have a deep affection today. I suppose I'd always in part separated the two just by the fact the war was 60 years ago and Japan had changed a lot since then, but seeing this film drove home the reality that many aspects of Japanese culture just haven't really changed. The film paints a picture of people full of warmth and with a strong sense of community. They are not wallowing in defeat, but instead are remembering how horrible the war was, and are elated at the fact that it is over. Not unlike post-war films in the West really - to the average civilian war was something imposed on them, not something they ever actually wanted.

The main plot of "Nagaya shinshiroku" revolves around an apparently abandoned boy who is taken in begrudgingly by an initially rather mean old widow, who inevitably softens up and grows very fond of him. I suppose you could call it formulaic, but then it was made over 60 years ago, and so it probably would be fairer to say that many other films have borrowed from this one since. Certainly the central theme was quite reminiscent of a few recent Japanese films - such as Kikujiro and Always san-chome no yuhi.

As always it featured my favourite Chishu Ryu, albeit again in a fairly minor part. As seems to be a case in many of the Ozu films, Ryu sings at one point in this, and although the song has no real relevance to the film, it is an oddly spellbinding moment. Whilst Ryu's acting is often a bit wooden at times, he does have this odd enigmatic quality about him, and I am starting to understand why Ozu was always so keen to get him in pretty much all of his films.

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