The Only Son

The Only Son (一人息子, 1936) is Yasujiro Ozu's Japanese drama, available to watch online on iFILM. It was the director's first film with sound, made at the Shochiku studio, and it remains one of his quietest, most piercing studies of the distance between parents and grown children.

A widow named Otsune raises her boy in the countryside on almost nothing. When a schoolteacher warns that there is no future without an education, she sacrifices everything she has to send him off to Tokyo. Years pass. She finally travels to the city to see him — and finds that her only son has become a modest night-school teacher, scraping by to support a wife and child of his own. The big city promised a great deal and delivered little.

Ozu tells it through long, still shots and things left unsaid; disappointment here is never shouted, only read in slumped shoulders and the silences between lines. His regular collaborator Chishu Ryu appears, with Choko Iida as the mother. It is slow, melancholy cinema for anyone ready to sit with the hushed humanism of classic Japanese film. Stream The Only Son (1936) online on iFILM.