“Generally regarded as Ozu’s first masterpiece, Umarete wa mita keredo… is the most stylistically assured of his surviving early works. His control over comic performance (especially the delightful acting-in-unison of the two brothers) and his carefully timed editing makes the film remarkably rigorous. His characteristic low camera height and deep space set objects and figures hovering in various zones of space. In the opening scene, for instance, the low camera position and the decoupage make father, driver, and boys float free of the earth. Only the truck’s wheel is grounded. In a richly reflexive gesture, Ozu even parodies himself in Iwasaki’s home movie. Random shots of streets and boats in Iwasaki’s footage evoke the landscapes of earlier and later Ozu works. (These shots make Iwasaki’s audience yawn!). The camera position in the second reel recalls the slightly higher camera placement in Ozu’s preceding films. All this artistry is put at the service of a rather didactic theme. Subtitled, A Picture-Book for Adults, this is a film à these, a lesson in the social use of power. As the boys rise in the neighborhood gang, their father reveals more of his subordination at work. In the world of the boys, power comes from age, brains, and brawn, so they cannot understand that adult power is implacably social, derived from money and position. The brothers’ illusion is that all power can be won through straightforward abilities, as they are able to take over the gang by outfighting the others. The script began as a social comedy, and a satiric tone is preserved in the various rituals of power that are compared.

Ozu brings out the developing situations through his typical use of parallel events: two visits to the boss’s house, two trips to school, two pauses at the railroad crossing, two eatings of pidgeon eggs, and so on. Virtually every scene echoes and counterpoints another. Some comparisons are brought to our attention through the lateral camera movements that link school and office, linking drilling boys to bored salarymen. Ozu, subtly balances the boys’ perspective with that of the adults. Most of the plot is restricted to what the boys know, so that for instance, we share the boys surprise when Yoshii follows them to school. This restriction is most powerful when they discover Yoshii’s capers for Iwasaki’s movie. After the fight between father and sons, however, the narration shifts openly to the adults’ frame of reference. As the boys sleep, the father fletches out his whiskey bottle and muses on his failure. For the first time, we see the parents alone and discussing their lives. Yoshii moves from self-assured pragmatism to self-justifying shame. He and his wife look in on the brothers and ask: ‘Will they lead the same kind of sorry lives we have?’. After so severe a restriction of the boys’ ken, this gradual unfolding of Yoshii’s attitudes and doubts puts the home-movie scene in a more encompassing perspective. Yoshii grovels because he can do nothing else”.

(David Bordwell, Les cahiers du muet, n. 23, 1993)