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An exemplary display of Ozu’s deft comic timing, as well as his characteristic grace and humanity. Despite being a fairly early entry in the director’s oeuvre, this silent film feels stunningly modern. This may be partially owed to its slick editing and loose, gliding camera, but nothing impresses more than the affectionately drawn child protagonists, acted so precisely and intuitively by Hideo Sugawara and Tomio Aoki. The ways in which Ozu captures the little moments between them, their father, or their school peers is an object lesson in behavioral observation, whether it’s in the humor of one boy always forgetting to zip his fly or how, by inherited synchronicity, the brothers fondly repeat each other’s actions. Weaving in pointed social commentary and always keeping the focus on the boys’ changing, bittersweet attitudes towards family and society, I Was Born, But… is a sterling, unassuming gem.

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A beautifully shot comedy and tragedy rolled into one. It’s one thing when an adult is disillusioned, but it’s a whole nother level of sad when a little kid is. This movie portrays a small moment in the two sons of a salaryman’s life, their dealing with bullies at the new school, and their observations of the adult world. It’s poignant; you can see how these very simple events affected them, signifying their entry into an adult world. An aside: I don’t think there is a single Ozu movie without a train in it.

Yasuhiro Ozu’s early silent comedy about how children encounter the class system is surprisingly fresh and enduring, even if it does creak a little with age. Two young boys, whose father has transferred to a new job, start life at a new school and immediately run into trouble with bullies. They try to avoid confrontation either by skipping school, hiding behind their father, getting a local beer salesman to serve as their tough guy, or ultimately taking their own chances in a fight.

As with most children, self-esteem has a lot to do with family status, and a chance event shows them that the father they look up to is, also, a man who has to scrape and bow before people who are more important, like the father of one of their classmates. Their father suddenly seems to them a fool, and alters their sense of who they are; the father, likewise, finds himself hoping his boys grow up to become something more than “an apple-polisher like me.”

Ozu tended to focus on people middle aged and older, calmly observing the inevitable stages of life — work, marriage, getting ahead, death — and the inevitable sense of decline that comes as goals are put off and illusions are shattered with each passing year. Although this is one of the few to focus specifically on children — another is the late-career “Good Morning!” — it shows that his themes were already very much in place, particularly how our sense of who we are as adults is shaped by childhood. It bears the subtitle “A Picture Book for Adults”; as with any family scrapbook, it offers both a lot of fond memories and a melancholy bite.