Days of Youth

Days of Youth (学生ロマンス 若き日, 1929) is a silent comedy by Yasujiro Ozu. The seven or eight films he directed before this are considered lost, making Student Romance: Days of Youth, as it’s also known, his earliest surviving picture.

This playful story follows two university students (Ichiro Yuki and Tatsuo Saito) who, during winter exams, take a skiing trip to Akakura and compete for the affection of the same girl (Junko Matsui). Although what remains is now blotchy, faded, and uneven, the film has fortunately survived. Countless others from that era have decayed beyond restoration, burned up, or were destroyed long ago to make space for new ones.

The glimpses of 1920s Tokyo were the highlights for me, along with the slapstick scenes on the slopes, featuring some rather nasty spoilsport gags. The film also includes a number of delightful shots of smokestacks, automobiles, telephone poles, and other technologies of the time. Throughout the narrative, there’s a subtle undercurrent of transience, as suggested by the title, reflecting the distinctive sense of mono no aware for which Ozu would later become known.