Record of a Tenement Gentleman

In a bombed-out Tokyo neighbourhood, an older woman reluctantly takes in a boy his father has abandoned. Her intention is to be rid of him as fast as possible. The boy does not speak, wets the bed and asks for nothing. Her hardness comes apart slowly against that silence. This is Ozu's first film after the war. He returned in 1946 from a prisoner of war camp near Singapore, re-entered the studio and wrote this script in twelve days, and the film opened on 20 May 1947. The five-year gap before it was the longest break of his career. In seventy-two minutes the film shows the wreckage without discussing it: broken walls, missing fathers, children with nobody on the street. Ozu does this without appeals to pity and without dropping the humour. Chōko Iida plays the woman, Chishū Ryū a neighbour. Who it's for: Viewers who like Ozu, everyday life in postwar Japan, and drama built out of few words. Who it's not for: The telling is calm and the plot is small, and the technical refinement of Ozu's later work has not fully settled here yet.