Ozu again.

Early Spring (1956), directed by Yasujiro Ozu. Ozu is one of the truly great film makers. His work is remarkably consistent and consistently beautiful. Early Spring comes after his best-known film, Tokyo Story (1953), and it focuses on the "salaryman," a white-collar worker or office worker, the type of worker who rises early, shaves, and catches the commuter train into the city day after day. Shoji (Ryo Ikebe) is the main character. He is married to Masako (Chicago Awashima). They have had one child who has died. While on a Sunday walk in the country with fellow workers, Shoji strikes up a relationship with Goldfish, a young woman with designs on Shoji. Soon they are having an affair that puts Shoji's marriage in jeopardy. The characters are all young or middle-aged workers, employees of a fire brick manufacturing company. This film lacks the inter-generational conflicts that dominate so many of Ozu's films, but it does remain focused on family life in that the main concern is marriage. We have the signature Ozu style with static camera, clear compositional lines, especially horizontals in the way of doorways, windows, walls, corridors, narrow streets, signs, chimneys, telephone poles, and so on. As always with Ozu, we view the world from just about two or three feet above the floor or ground, except for one or two crane shots such as one showing workers walking through the bus parking lot (see below). Ozu's camera delivers a stillness that often accentuates the tensions emotions the characters try to contain. The still camera is nicely at odds with the moving of the state of things. This is post war Japan just entering the modern industrial world. To cope with this world, characters do a lot of drinking. The gathering of people to drink, party, or play mahjong is one of the many attractions of Ozu's world.

Tokyo Twilight (1957), directed by Yasujiro Ozu. There is a scene in this film that sets the tone. This scene is unlike anything I might expect from Ozu. The action takes place in a dark nightclub. People sit about in the shadows with their drinks looking moody and holding secrets. Well they look moody and secretive, not their drinks. On the rear wall is a large picture of Robert Mitchum. Yes, really. The scene plays like something from an American film noir. The police come to take a young woman away. Of course Tokyo Twilight has the trademarks of Ozu's work: unmoving camera, insistence on verticals and blocked compositions, interest in family and also generations, and a quiet insistence on the importance of everyday commonality. But this film has a darkness not often found in Ozu's work. Here we have adultery, abortion, single parenthood (both a single father and a single mother), and an apparent suicide. All this plays out in Ozu's world of narrow streets and alleys, small rooms, skylines of wires and telephone poles and signs, and so on. I found the story compelling, that is until the final 15 or 20 minutes. It is not that the final moments of the film disappoint from a narrative standpoint; it is simply that Ozu drags out the denouement far too long, or at least far too long for my patience. Make no mistake, these long moments are important and moving. It is just that they would have been more moving had they been shorter. Let me just conclude by saying this crepuscular story is well worth your attention.

Late Autumn (1960), directed by Yasujiro Ozu. Transition is once again front and centre in this gentle but compelling Ozu film. On the soundtrack I detected the strains of music from The Beggar’s Opera and at first I thought this strange. But Frances points out that despite the veneer of gentility and warmth, the knives are out in the interplay of generations and genders here. The young woman, Ayako (Yoko Tsukasa) is determined not to marry and leave her widowed mother Akiko (Setsuko Hara). She does not wish to leave her mother alone, and she does not wish to marry at the insistence of three older men who, without asking, meddle in the affairs of this mother and daughter. Ayako expresses her independence. And yet when the possibility of her mother remarrying surfaces, Ayako becomes intensely resistant. Here she follows the old ways. In other words, she is caught between the past and the future. Two thirds of the way through the film the focus shifts to a friend and co-worker of Ayako’s, Yuriko (Mariko Okada). Yuirko lets the three older gentlemen who have set out to arrange marriages just how meddling and intrusive and impertinent they are, and she does so in no uncertain terms. This is quintessential Ozu, quiet, intense, gentle but emotional, and deeply human. As always, his camera underscores the meaningful stillness of things. And as one of Ozu’s few colour films, Late Autumn never forgets that one spot of red to set thing off. The final shot is bittersweet as it rests on Akiko and her sad smile.

 Three by Ozu.

The Only Son (1936), directed by Yasujiro Ozu. I have probably said this before, but I will say it again: Ozu is the most exquisite director I know. His films are consistently intense, minimal, probing, reflexive, painterly, delicate, subtle, and downright beautiful. Ozu’s style is unique, his placement of the camera low and fixed. The Only Son is another film about family, here a family of two, a single mother and her only son. They live in some poverty and the mother hopes to see her son get an education and become a success. The son leaves for school in Tokyo and becomes a night-school teacher, a humble job that pays barely subsistence wages. The shots of the machines at which the mother works are reminders of the daily round of drudgery workers experience. The shots of clothing and fabric hung on clotheslines and flapping like rags in the wind remind us of the fragmentary nature of life lived on the edge. The shot of the mother and son out for a pleasant stroll and sitting not far from a station that burns refuse is a reminder of life’s hopes. This is a quiet film, obviously influenced by the depression, but serving to as a portrait of working people then and now, in Japan and elsewhere. When the son takes his visiting mother on a tour of Tokyo, we see nothing of the bustling city, just a skyline from the fender of the vehicle in which they ride. The Tokyo we do see is a barren land on the city’s periphery that contains refuse, smoke, and chimneys and run-down abodes. The final shot of a closed and locked wooden gate is, perhaps, the most powerful shot in a powerful film.

Equinox Flower (1958), directed by Yasujiro Ozu. This is Ozu's first colour film, and he knows how to use that one spot of red (kettle, afghan, carpet, flower, belt, and so on). This is an amusing contemplation of a changing society. The men are confused, befuddled, and contradictory. The women are smiling and resolute and independent. The women are resolute in a gentle way. Indeed, this film is gentle as well as genteel. The wife patiently picks up after her husband when he comes home from work and takes off his clothes and drops them carelessly on the floor. But she stands her ground when it comes to her daughter's marriage. Ozu is so distinctive. His camera stubbornly refuses to move. He gives us portraits more than movement, and we see things from a consistent level. This level somehow levels everything in a world that strives for an unequal terrain. Style is consistent even if the husband's advice to others is inconsistent with his treatment of his daughter. Style wins the day. So too does a gentle humour.

Floating Weeds (1959), directed by Yasujiro Ozu. This is Ozu's remake of his 1934 version of the story, A Story of Floating Weeds. Once again we have Ozu interested in family dynamic, here a fractured family. An itinerant actor returns with his troup to the place where he has left a woman with whom he fathered a son. The son has only known him as an uncle, the supposed brother of the mother. In short, the leading lady of the acting entourage is not pleased to learn that the man she has been having a relationship with has another woman and a son. Therein lies the drama. But what makes the film so absorbing are the shots of empty space, confining space, and the stubborn insistence of the camera to keep everything still, slow, cornered, straight, and direct. The snippets of the actors' performances remind us how pervasive performance is both on and off the stage. Performance, whether a father performing as an uncle or a young woman performing as a temptress or an actor performing as a street hawker of posters or a barber performing her craft, is bound to lead to complications, unexpected turns, and variations in script, and even a nick of the razor.

 A couple of double features.

Trucks. We watched Jonathan Hensleigh’s The Ice Road (2021) the other night and it brought to mind its original, Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Wages of Fear (1953), and so we re-watched that film too. What differentiates the two films? Well one takes place in northern Manitoba in April and the other takes place in some unnamed torrid zone. One is about graft, corruption, and greed involving diamond mining and the other is about graft, corruption, exploitation, and greed involving oil drilling and extraction. One has trucks that at any minute can sink through the ice into a couple hundred feet of water and the other has trucks that carry a lethal load of nitroglycerin. One has a character who sets out to sabotage the journey and the other has a character who is simply not suited to the job. One has Liam Neeson and the other has Yves Montand. One is in colour, the other in black and white. They differ in their endings, one having a typical Hollywood ending and the other having an ironic ending more suited to the characters. Both have tension. Clouzot’s film is justly admired for its thrill ride, filmed at a time when CGI could not help make things look believable. It has something of the “feel” of John Huston’s The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948), although the characters have an insouciance, especially at the beginning, that the characters in the other films lack. As a coda, I might add that the story has been filmed at least once more in William Friedkin’s Sorcerer (1977).

 

Two from writer/director Preston Sturges: The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek (1944) and The Palm Beach Story (1942). The first of these takes Capra’s small-town America and gives it a twirl so that it lands on its head. The kerfuffle over pre-marital sex and a pregnancy out of wedlock may seem quaint now, but Sturges is taking aim at the production code instituted in the early 30s. His screenplay incorporates words taken from correspondence with the Hollywood censor, Joseph Breen. Sturges satirizes family, marriage, politics (McGinty makes an appearance, that McGinty from Sturges’s 1940 film, The Great McGinty), and small-town life. The action is zany, the plot convoluted, the female lead’s name, Trudy Kockenlocker (Betty Hutton) is wry, and the whole concoction delightful. The Palm Beach Story also satirizes marriage. Here we have a devoted couple who are down on their luck. The wife (Claudette Colbert) decides to divorce her husband (Joel McCrea) in order to help him get on with his dream of building an experimental airport landing area. She finds a wealthy bachelor (Rudy Vallee) she woos in order have him fund her “ex-husband’s” airport. Of course, we have the familiar screwball mix-ups and misunderstandings and dialogue that overlaps and silliness laced with slapstick. In these films, Sturges brings together silent era physical comedy with 30s screwball plots and dialogue. The first of these films, Morgan’s Creek, takes the war for its background, but Palm Beach Story, made at the beginning of America’s engagement in the war, offers nary a trace of soldiers or America’s participation in the European or South Pacific theatres.