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1929
her. They encounter one of their professors, who sternly reports their failing grades. Back in Tokyo, Watanabe promises Yamamoto that he will find him a girlfriend through the ploy he used to meet Chieko.
Ozu's earliest surviving film cannot be called apprentice work. By his eighth effort, Ozu had mastered Western classical filmmaking. At the same time, we cannot help scanning the film for problems sighted, partial attempts, passages that point ahead to issues that Ozu would tackle later. This is no sketchbook — the script is too well-wrought for that — but Days of Youth does let us watch Ozu demonstrating his proficiency in certain conventions while displaying an urge to explore his own paths.
Days of Youth is clearly indebted to Japanese genres. As a student film, it refers constantly to Waseda University (the first expository title is a line from the college song) and flaunts the Westernized iconography of student life (pennants, skis, ukeleles, and so on). The credit drawings set the stage for a student movie, presenting bells, dice, alphabet letters, cocktails, musical notes, and a bit of English of which Ozu was fond: ‘Two is company.’ The film also constitutes a good instance of ero-guro-nansensu filmmaking, with the ero supplied by Watanabe’s patting of Chieko’s rear end, the guro by his scratching a doll’s hindquarters and jamming gum in a statuette’s eye, and the nansensu by the outrageous gag of the runaway ski and by such lines as a student admitting after an exam: | didn't memorize anything because I hate to forget things.’ But in many respects Days of Youth is not a typical Japanese film. Its immediate debts are clearly to Lloyd and Lubitsch, and the structural rigor of the plot and style put it far closer to the Hollywood comedy of the mid-1920s than to the somewhat undisciplined Japanese film of its period. Already Ozu is a considerably more fastidious and rigorous a filmmaker than most of his contemporaries.
The plot is woven of two lines: Watanabe and Yamamoto's romantic competition for Chieko and their attempt to pass their exams. The first line of action is introduced in a series of gags. In the first scene Watanabe uses an ‘apartment for rent’ ploy to meet Chieko and then she encounters Yamamoto (leading to gags with wet paint, a glove, and hot chocolate). Once Watanabe moves in with Yamamoto, the romantic triangle is plotted and the ‘exam hell’ line of action commences. The script alternates vignettes of college life with scenes of Watanabe visiting Chieko. The second half of the film is devoted to a four-day skiing trip. After the massive retardation furnished by many skiing stunts and gags, both lines of action are resolved. In an epilogue back in the boys’ apartment, Watanabe puts out a ‘room for rent’ sign so Yamamoto can find a girlfriend, and this buckles the film shut.
But the film’s tidiness only begins there. The plot has a thoroughgoing macrostructural symmetry, with the opening carefully echoing the ending and many scenes calculated to rhyme with one another. Large-scale parallel structure is especially important in the skiing scenes, which could degenerate into simple repetitions of the two rivals’ competition for Chieko. The script situates the skiing scenes within several frames, as can be seen schematically:
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