Yasujiro Ozu never went to college. By all accounts a poor student and rebellious young man, he took an early teaching position in a remote rural area precisely because it required no degree. Unsurprisingly, he didn’t last long in the job and eventually returned to Tokyo, joining Shochiku as an assistant cameraman. Nevertheless, in his early career at the studio he found himself contributing to their popular brand of college comedies of which I Flunked But… (落第はしたけれど, Rakudai wa shitakeredo) is his third, directed when he was 26 years of age.
Drawing inspiration from Hollywood campus movies and in particular Harold Lloyd’s The Freshman as we can see from the various US state college pennants seen hanging throughout the film, I Flunked But… follows a group of young men preparing for their final exams. They are all excited about the idea of graduating into the adult world as symbolised by the neat business suits they have each bought in preparation for their new lives and few seem burdened by anxiety about a potentially precarious future as members of a generation stepping into a world of reduced economic potential and growing political instability.
In fact they live the last days of their student lives to the full, greeting each other with silly dances, playing turntable roulette to decide who pays for dinner, and spending more time figuring out how to cheat on the exam than studying to pass it. There may be truth in the idea that passing exams is all about the knack, but our boys are overly invested in kicking back against the system rather than playing by its rules to get ahead. As the film opens, two students are arguing because one supposedly betrayed the other in promising to help him cheat and then not following through. Takahashi (Tatsuo Saito) is supposed to help his friends by wearing a shirt which has a cheat sheet scrawled on the back, but he oversleeps and the landlady swipes it for the laundryman. The others manage to scrape through on their own while Takahashi alone fails.
The remainder of the film becomes a more melancholy mediation on the changing fortunes of Takahashi and his friends. Overcome with shame and disappointment, Takahashi is left out of the others’ cheerful graduation celebrations, left with the choice to drop out or repeat the year (amusingly, one of his perpetual failure friends appears to be much older, even middle-aged, and one wonders if he is a serial repeater). The suit he had bought is now a grim reminder of his defeated hopes, as is the tie his girlfriend (Kinuyo Tanaka) who works in the bakery next-door was making for him as a graduation present. He now feels unworthy of wearing it, a fraudulent human trapped in adolescence by embarrassing failure. The girlfriend, however, already knows all about it and reassures him that even if he has not graduated, he still has the right to wear his graduation suit.
As time moves on, however, Takahashi realises that he might actually be the more fortunate. Still wearing his student uniform, he lives a carefree student life and is still receiving money for his upkeep which makes him the rich man among his dorm mates who are still living in the same rooms with him and have all had to pawn their graduation suits because there are no jobs for them to go to. “I heard it’s hard to get a job these days”, the girlfriend laments, and it’s clear the depression continues to bite. The college world was safe and easy. Takahashi carries on goofing off, silly dances and cheerleading the order of the day. In this sense at least, a perpetual childhood might not be so bad a thing. The graduates wistfully play with a student’s cap, wishing they could return to their carefree college days rather than stuck in their old dorm receiving nothing but rejection letters and hand outs from a slightly smug Takahashi. “If I’d known it would be like this I wouldn’t have graduated so hastefully” they lament. Maybe flunking is actually the smart choice, riding out economic instability until something better comes along. You might as well enjoy yourself while you can, Ozu seems to say, you’ll never have it so good again.
Prolific as he is, veteran director Yoji Yamada (or perhaps his frequent screenwriter in recent years Emiko Hiramatsu) clearly takes pleasure in selecting film titles but What a Wonderful Family! (家族はつらいよ, Kazoku wa Tsurai yo) takes things one step further by referencing Yamada’s own long running film series Otoko wa Tsurai yo (better known as Tora-san). Stepping back into the realms of comedy, Yamada brings a little of that Tora-san warmth with him for a wry look at the contemporary Japanese family with all of its classic and universal aspects both good and bad even as it finds itself undergoing number of social changes.
Mikio Naruse is often remembered for his female focussed stories of ordinary women trying to do they best they can in often difficult circumstances, but the earliest extant example of his work (actually his ninth film), Flunky, Work Hard (腰弁頑張れ, Koshiben Ganbare), is the sometimes comic but ultimately poignant tale of a lowly insurance salesman struggling to get ahead in depression era Japan.
Windows on Worlds 