Tokyo Story: DVD Review
November 8, 2003
The great Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu made films about, quite simply, family dynamics. Some say his films were so similar to each other that they are hard to tell apart, with unusually familiar titles, recurring actors and character names; if you’ve seen one, detractors will say, you’ve seen them all. In a way this is true, but it’s unfair, for why fault a director when he clearly has something down so perfectly he decides to run with it? Ozu had a style all his own (“Ozuian” is now a common word amongst film buffs) and in 1953, in the early stages of his latter life, he made perhaps his most perfectly realized picture, “Tokyo Story”, a movie lauded the world over as one of the ten best films of all time, and is now finally out on DVD, courtesy of a great two disk edition from the geniuses at The Criterion Collection.
With “Tokyo Story” Ozu said, “Through the growth of both parents and children, I described how the Japanese family system has begun to come apart.” It’s characteristic of Ozu, who added that the film was his most melodramatic effort up to that point that he thought so simply and broadly about his beloved film. In his storied career he was constantly presenting the Japanese family as a shifting structure (not unlike Japan itself, before and after the war) with the onus on parents and their disappointments in their children and insolent grandchildren. He worked with generations, the differences of old and new, of tradition vs. expansion, and in an Ozu film you get the uncanny feel, usually in the form of a departing daughter or a parental death, of a profound loss. With this, one can understand the mystery of his gravestone, which simply has one character, “Mu”, which translates roughly as “nothingness”, and why, at the age of 50, for most at the grip of middle age, the life-long bachelor constructed “Tokyo Story” as an ode to parents and the sometimes rotten way grown children can treat them from afar.
The film is deliberately paced to draw out its characters and hammer home its emotions. For a film 136 minutes long, very little “action” takes place. There are only four or five settings with only the slightest hint of a plot. It’s been said that in his early career Ozu was obsessed with presenting a meaningful plot (even in his initial campus silent comedies), but near the end of the ‘40’s, when he came to hone his craft (and subsequently make the films he’s best known for today) he flipped perspectives and focused more on characterization, rather than heavy plotting. Thus, he was able to sketch one story (about two elderly parents on a long city visit to each of their grown-up children) and pepper it with at least ten distinguishable characters, each one representing their own piece in a patriarchal Japanese family/society. In “Tokyo Story” the result is so deeply moving that the film has become the staple of Japanese cinema studies as cultural entity, even more so than the legendary works of Kurosawa (the structuralist) and Mizoguchi (the formalist).
Made at the great Shochiku studios (Ozu’s life-long studio, from 1923, where he started, like most Japanese company men, at the bottom, through his death in 1963) “Tokyo Story” concerns roughly ten days as Shukichi (Ozu’s leading man Chishu Ryu) and his wife Tomi (Chieko Higashiyama) travel from their small village home in Onomichi to the vastly different big city of Tokyo to visit their children, who, much to their dismay, have become hardened and uncaring in their busy lives. There is Shige (Haruko Sugimura), the eldest daughter, a hairdresser with a husband and two bratty boys and little patience to baby-sit her parents for three days. Similarly, the eldest son, Koichi (So Yamamura) is a local doctor so busy he has to cancel a planned sightseeing trip with his parents in lieu of a sick patient. “I’m surprised how much children change,” says the father to the mother, in a quintessential Ozuian moment of reflection.
Indeed, for the parents there has been much change since the war. Now retired and living with their youngest daughter, a schoolteacher, the days are spent on the tatami mat, sipping tea, chatting with nosy neighbors (about the weather, an Ozu trademark) and contemplating life. Their second born son was lost in the war eight years earlier, and on their trip to Tokyo, his widow, Noriko (Setsuko Hara) is the only one who pays them the kindness they deserve, especially after they return from an ill gotten getaway at the hot springs of Atami, which was a hasty excuse by the elder two offspring to unburden themselves from hosting duties. It’s through Noriko, the kind and regretful daughter-in-law that the story finds its angel, as in many of these post war Ozu melodramas played so delicately by the great Setsuko Hara, a treasure in Japanese film history.
Like most of the director’s films, “Tokyo Story” takes great patience in unraveling its poetics and emotions. At first you may not (if you’re unfamiliar with Ozu’s style) understand the relationships, or where he is ultimately going with them. There is a lot of contemplation, from the father, out on a bender with some old friends, saying “we can’t expect too much from our children,” to the mise-en-scene constructions, which, characteristic of Ozu, likes to rest on objects, “pillow shots” of smoke stacks, water, boats, clotheslines, trains, railroad crossings, telephone wires and construction sites as links between scenes and as symbols of nature, intrusion, and generation distance, ala city and country, parents and children.
The style of Yasujiro Ozu is instantly recognizable (so much so that it’s been written about endlessly, from Paul Schrader to Donald Richie, Lindsay Anderson and David Bordwell, he is a director of many admirers) for its minimalism but also for its radical deconstructing of cinematic norms. His conversations were filmed straight forward, with graphic matches from body to body, each character looking slightly to the right, lending mismatched eye lines that, if you think about, would mean the characters aren’t really looking at each other at all, but in opposite directions. His transition shots were so plentiful that they are part of the narrative structure while his basic camera setups (a foot off the ground, in traditional Japanese sitting style, with very little movements, save for a few dolly shots, frequently in pre-“Tokyo Story” films) let him cut in unconventional 180-degree jumps, very un-Hollywood. His compositions were meticulously cramped, and he became notorious for moving objects between shots, giving little thought to the continuity mishaps, maddening his set director, to no avail.
In Ozu films you found similar stories. His three most important films of the early ‘50’s (“Tokyo Story” and “Late Spring” and “Early Summer” before) all dealt in stories where the dramatic crux came with the Setsuko Hara character (named Noriko in all three films) leaving on a train at the end. In “Tokyo Story” she leaves to go back to the city after the death of the mother, in “Late Spring” it’s to marry and leave the widowed father (Ryu, again) alone, and in “Early Summer” to, you guessed it, finally marry and break up the family. If these themes seem repetitive than it must be said that they are never boring, on the contrary, the poetic devices of the filmmaking and the time invested into the characters pays off in emotional depths uncommon to his early silent comedies and pre-war social films, which he outgrew after the war looking obsessively at American films (“Citizen Kane”, he admitted, was an inspiration) while stationed in the Philippines.
Any of these films, up to his final film “An Autumn Afternoon” in ’63, completed shortly before his death of cancer on his 60th birthday, ten years after “Tokyo Story”, are perfect examples of the Ozu mystique. But it’s always “Tokyo Story” that stands out as the ultimate masterpiece in a cannon of fantastic films because it’s utterly Japanese, yet impossibly universal. Family separation, a mothers death, a cultural division, pain, regret, disappointment and loss; in these themes and characters you can find yourself, and the realizations, like when the youngest son says, at his mothers funeral, “none can serve his parents beyond the grave,” are tough to take and hard to forget. The lesson being, sometimes, like the puttering boats in Onomichi harbor, the trains and telephone wires connecting Tokyo to the countryside, you have to move ahead in life in order to fully make due, and reparations with the past.
The Criterion Collection has released “Tokyo Story” on DVD with two great feature length documentaries on the career of Ozu, as well as an informative commentary track by film scholar David Desser. An absolute essential.
by Adam Suraf