In an interview with the famous critic Donald Ritchie, an expert on Japanese cinema, the great director Yasujiro Ozu declared that movies with 'obvious plots" had a tendency to 'bore him". He went on to say that a motion picture just wasn’t any good 'if it has too much drama or action." All of which is to note that Ozu’s cinematic sensibility seems as far from the conventions of commercial cinema as you can get. Hearing this, and not knowing Ozu films like Tokyo Story or Floating Weeds, you might anticipate the director’s movies as in some way remote, cold or intellectual – and that would be wrong. Watch any one film of the seven Ozu pictures included in Madman’s fine Director’s Suite Box Set and you come away stunned and warmed – by Ozu’s sublime restraint and his superb technique and his humanity. Ozu’s cinematic voice is rich and complex, sad and funny, humble and kind. To experience Ozu at his best is like spending time with a much loved older relative, an Uncle. say, who knows all the family secrets, and calmly accepts every human foible not as some terrible sin, but as a sign of a hope mislaid or a desire left unfulfilled.
According to Ozu aficionado, filmmaker Paul Schrader, the director’s post-WWII work was in a genre indigenous to Japanese cinema, the shomin and the shomin-geki. These were films set in a lower middle-class life milieu and concerned themselves with contemporary small-scale family dramas centred on domestic crises; arranged marriages, and inter-generational bitterness or the quest for youngsters to break free from the confines of home and family.
For many fans, Tokyo Story, made in 1953, is the supreme example of Ozu’s style. Routinely elected by international critics as one of the greatest of all films made in the sound era, its premise, at least in cold print, makes it appear as boring as dirt. Simply put, it is about an elderly married couple, Shukichi (Chishu Riyu) and Tomi Hirayama (Chieko Higashimaya) who travel to Tokyo from the provinces in order to visit their grown up children and the widow of their eldest son, Kyoko (So Yamamura, in the film’s best and most heartbreaking performance). Out of this simple set-up emerges a riveting and deeply moving low-key drama.
Happy to encounter the big city (their first visit) and catch up with their children, the old couple soon begin to see themselves as intruders, or worse burdens on the lives of their loved ones. The ensuring conflicts aren’t worked out in shouting matches, harsh words and tragic silences. When expectations of familial love and bonding and the obligations they represent are not met, the impact is as shattering as an earthquake. Only Kyoko seems to grasp the true toll on her in-laws.
Shooting low to the ground – in imitation of the traditional Japanese position of taking a meal – Ozu’s camera rarely moves. The effect isn’t voyeuristic detachment, but meaningful involvement. Ozu’s style asks us to watch, listen, absorb and learn. It’s a powerful vision; when the movie ends it’s like losing a friend, since we seem to have got to know these folks like we were born into the world with them.
Sound and image on the disc is fine; considering the age and source of the materials; extras on this two-disc set include a really excellent stills gallery, the original theatrical trailer and filmmaker and Ozu fan Wim Wenders’ strange, beautiful and highly eccentric full length essay film 'tribute’ to the director, Tokyo-Ga. In it, Wenders attempts to 'find’ the Japan he only knew from Ozu’s movies and he discovers a city of pop sub-cultures and bizarre images. But he does interview Ozu actor Chishu Ryu and cameraman Yuhara Atsuta.
