Floating Weeds

September 26, 2004

        Yasujiro Ozu’s 1959 masterwork “Floating Weeds" was the great directors third, and most confident color picture, made for Daiei (not his contract studio, which was Shochiku), with legendary cinematographer Kazuo Miyagawa (“Sansho the Bailiff”, “Rashomon”) capturing Ozu’s reds and oranges, transitions and frames-within-frames like a seasoned catcher catching a Hall of Fame pitcher for the first time.  It is, like most of his films of this fruitful period, a film indirectly about the dissolution of the modern Japanese family, but where it differs from, say, “Tokyo Story”, or “Early Summer”, is that the central family really isn’t a family at all; they are an illegitimate shell of a family, buried in lies, heartbreak, and secrecy.  If “Tokyo Story” represents the director in his most accomplished, and personal study of the effects of distance and modernity on the core family unit, than “Floating Weeds”, a slightly altered remake of his beautiful 1934 silent “A Story of Floating Weeds”, is his most subversive, for in its general story of a traveling theater group, whose leader returns to his common law wife, as an “uncle”, to meet his 20-year-old son, Ozu is giving up normal father-son dynamics in lieu of sheltered feelings and eventual acceptance at the unpredictable, often painful winds of change, like, as the famous Japanese metaphor, and Ozu’s inspiration goes, “Floating weeds, drifting down the leisurely river of our lives.”

            Famous Kabuki actor Ganjiro Nakamura stars as Komajuro, an aging master of a traveling troupe of actors who stop at a small mountain town for a month-long stint, but when rain washes out their performance, and essentially their whole act (no crowds means no money), the focus becomes Komajuro’s interactions with his son, Kiyoshi (Hiroshi Kawaguchi), and his bitter, somewhat hurt, and wicked mistress, Sumiko (Machiko Kyo), who enacts a revenge plot to steal the boy away from his family, by means of seduction and trickery.  The film is about as circular as any in Ozu’s canon, starting with the arrival of the troupe, by boat, in the daylight, and closing on the fading red light of the departing train, at night, after the fates of the characters have been decided (for the time being anyway), and with the course of everyday life (which includes, in order, the brothel, the barbershop, and the theater) resuming, almost- almost- as if that puttering boat never docked in the first place.

            With “Floating Weeds”, Ozu came to master the use of color photography, something he shunned most of his career, and failed to perfect with “Good Morning”, or “Equinox Flower”, both nice films, but not the masterpiece that “Floating Weeds” would be.  The trademark camera position (low, symbolizing a kneeling person on a tatami mat) was still ever present, as were the mismatched conversation lines, “pillow” transition shots of lighthouses, smoke stacks, and telephone wires, and brilliant, meticulous framing, often with discontinuous objects appearing and disappearing like static ghosts (Ozu didn’t care), but what sets this film apart, I think, is the incredible color scheme, which goes from early brightness, to late darkness, as the secrets are revealed, and the family begins to crumble.  Epitomized by the famous shouting match between Komajuro and Sumiko, separated (her left, him right) by a torrential downpour, in dark blues, “Floating Weeds” is a film that not only suggests the passing of time, and the unmistakable regret one feels after abandonment, but visualizes it in warm, and cold compositions.  Compositions that very well may be the most punctiliously assured setups in Ozu’s long, distinguished career. 

by Adam Suraf

asuraf@DunkirkMA.net