More from Japan.

The Story of the Late Chrysanthemums (1939), directed by Kenji Mizoguchi. Near the beginning of his career, Mizoguchi sets a pattern giving us the story of a woman who sacrifices everything for a man. He presents his story in slow long takes with the camera more often than not set at a distance from the actors, or from a middle distance. Rare are close-ups or full face-on shots. This gives the proceedings the air of a theatre performance, something pertinent here because the story follows the life of a young kabuki actor, Kinunosuke (Shotaro Hanayagi), from a famous acting family who at first fails to impress with his performances, finds himself leaving Tokyo for Osaka, then falling farther when he joins an itinerant group of performers, and finally after much suffering learns his trade. He does all this with the help of the long-suffering woman, Otoku (Kakuko Mori), who becomes his wife much to the chagrin of his father. The point seems to be that arts demands suffering, and suffering nurtures great art. In any case, Kinunosuke’s art takes the life of Otoku who is willing, even anxious, to sacrifice herself for the man she loves. What is noteworthy about this film is the camera, its placing and its fluid movement. Take for example an early scene in which the two young lovers walk along a quiet dark road. The camera is placed in a ditch below the path on which the two people walk so that we look up at them. The camera placement is odd and therefore catches our eyes. What we are seeing is that these two people are elevated above the petty gossipers and disapprovers who attempt to thwart their love. Much of the time, we watch as people, often quite a few people, perform their tasks in the distance. All the world’s a stage, etc. 

 

The Life of Oharu (1952), directed by Kenji Mizoguchi. Here is another masterful exploration of patriarchy’s greed and self-interest. Mizoguchi’s film tells the story of a privileged woman’s fall from a position of comfort into degradation. Oharu (Kinuyo Tanaka) is a lady at court who falls in love with a lowly page (Toshiro Mifune). This is a forbidden love and results in the page’s execution and Oharu’s exile from the court and Kyoto. Thus begins her downward journey into various humiliating situations – concubine to a lord, wife, mother, nun, courtesan, wouldbe suicide - until she finally becomes a prostitute. Through it all, Oharu maintains her dignity. The film ends with her a mendicant going from house to house seeking alms. Mizoguchi characteristically films most of this from a distance, his camera slowly following the movements of people, often from a heightened position. Two scenes stand out: one in which Oharu disrobes to give her garments to a greedy seller of fabrics who claims she has taken the fabric from him, and the other in which a wealthy lady for whom Oharu works reveals that a disease has caused her hair to fall out. These two scenes powerfully show just how powerless women are, how fragile is their place in society. As ever, Mizoguchi’s camera locates items that underscore what is happening, two short stalky pillars in the scene in which Oharu becomes the page’s lover, the many busts of disciples of Buddha, the temple, the stone wall, and so on. This is not a ghost story (I think of Ugetsu), and yet is has the haunting effect of a ghost story. 

 

What Did the Lady Forget? (1937), directed by Yasujiro Ozu. Ozu’s second sound film is something of a dry-run for The Flavour of Green Tea Over Rice. Like the latter film, What Did the Lady Forget? Has a middle-aged couple at odds with each other, and a niece visiting who brings with her the winds of change. The niece, as in Green Tea, is named Setsuko (Michiko Kuwano), and she is strong-willed and modern in outlook. This is a small film, running just 71 minutes, and it is distantly reminiscent of the screwball comedies Hollywood was beginning to produce at the time. At one moment, Setsuko mentions Frederic March, a reminder of her interest in Hollywood films, and quite possibly Ozu’s interest in these films. The film does have one shocking moment when the doctor professor Komiya (Tatsuo Saito) slaps his wife Tokiko (Sumiko Kuishima), and she reacts by admiring his manliness. This film is, perhaps, lesser Ozu, but lesser Ozu is far better than other films then and now.

 

There Was a Father (1942), directed by Yasujiro Ozu. Ozu is one of cinema’s most recognizable directors with his fixed camera, nearly always just above ground level, his tendency to include shots of spaces empty of human activity, his framing through doorways or windows or hallways, and his emphasis on family and sacrifice and time. There Was a Father clearly follows the Ozu aesthetic. It is a wartime film that alludes only obliquely to the war. What sets the film within the wartime sensibility is the emphasis on patriarchy, on the father as a figure to be honoured and obeyed, and as a figure willing to sacrifice his happiness for the success of his son. Shuhei Horikawa (Chisu Ryu) is a well-liked teacher in a provincial town. While on a school excursion with a group of his students, one of the students dies in a boating mishap; one shot of an upturned boat is enough for Ozu to communicate what has happened. This image tells us not only that a student has drowned, but also that Horikawa is now alone and his life upturned. He never recovers from the sense that his negligence caused the student’s death. He now sets out to see that his son finds the success that he, the father, could not have. This means sending his son to boarding school, and moving away for work in an office in the big city. Father and son, from that time on, see each other only occasionally. Although the wartime virtues of duty, sacrifice, and hard work are front and centre, these take on a distinctly ambiguous air as Ozu examines the relationship between father and son over many years. The love between father and son is perhaps most endearingly shown in scenes of the two fishing, tossing their long rods in unison. Early in the film these shots suggest a unity between father and son. Late in the film we see a similar shot of father and now grown son only from a different angle. This second shot ends with a feeling of separation rather than unity, and not long after this, the father takes ill and dies. The film offers Ozu’s characteristically quiet, yet intense, world of families struggling to come to terms with outside forces and with time itself. The trains we see here might remind us of the inexorable movement of time, the movement both away from and toward home. Ozu’s cinema is the cinema of mood and stillness, even as time delivers its challenges to human desire for security and peace. Ozu is a very special film maker.

 

The Flavour of Green Tea Over Rice (1951) directed by Yasujiro Ozu. Ozu is one of cinema’s most recognizable directors, and also one of its most subtle, sly, delicate, and consistent directors. His consistency lies in both theme and aesthetic. He deals with family conflict, intergenerational tensions, and class differences. He deals with tradition confronting modernity. His camera rarely moves, and when it does, it does so smoothly, quietly, and unobtrusively; it also rarely, if ever, rises above waist level. He frames shots with doorways, windows, hallways, streets, often layered to give a strong sense of the frame as confinement. Such compositional geometry finds punctuation in still shots of signs or trees or man-made structures such as a water tower. His titles, The Flavour of Green Tea Over Rice, Late Spring, Early Summer, The Floating Weeds, Tokyo Twilight, Late Autumn, The End of Summer, and so on evoke time; they have the whiff of nostalgia. In short, Ozu is a special director and his films offer delicacies that are rare in cinema. The Flavour of Green Tea Over Rice is one of the most satisfying of Ozu’s films taking us to baseball games and bicycle races, as well as to a pachinko parlour and a spa. The story follows the marital difficulties of Mokichi (Shin Saburi) and his wife, Taeko (Michyo Kogure), the efforts of their niece Setsuko (Keiko Tsushima) to avoid an arranged marriage and get on with her new friend Noburo (Koji Tsuruta), and the relationships with close friends of Mokichi and Taeko. This film comes just before Ozu’s most famous (and celebrated – number 4 on Sight and Sound’s most recent list of the greatest 100 films ever!) film, Tokyo Story. I found it just as good as Tokyo Story, maybe even more satisfying. I should mention the importance of food in this film. Food brings people together and it may also nudge them apart.

 

Good Morning (1959), directed by Yasujiro Ozu. Ozu is special. Watching this film, I could not but think that Wes Anderson has seen and absorbed Good Morning. This film has the colour palette, the geometry, the stillness, the close-ups, the sensibility we see again in Anderson’s work. But Ozu remains distinct. Here he is in a light-hearted mood, as the jaunty music over the credit sequence lets us know. Light-hearted this film may be, but it takes on serious matter nonetheless. The focus is on communication. The children criticize the adults for making meaningless small talk, the adults rationalize such small talk as lubrication, a loosening of the gears of communication. Adults also indulge in gossip and rumour, communication that can be hurtful. Such small talk is a sort of flatulence, a point made several times throughout the film, not least when one adult male character farts, only to have his wife appear asking if he had called her. This occurs more than once. The children play a farting game, twirling an arm in victory when they have successfully farted. I might add that the sound of the farts differs from one person to another. Then we have silence as a mode of communication when the two principal boys refuse to talk because their parents will not purchase a television. The television is also a communication device, one that shows Sumo wrestling. Wrestling itself is perhaps a sign of communication in a rough but regimented mode. Regimentation is a way of life, as the boys’ school uniforms may indicate. The television also gives us an image of boxed in communication, and the people we meet here lived in compartmented spaces. Finally, this film, like its precursor in Ozu’s filmography, I Was Born, But … (1932), gives us a perspicacious view of childhood. We have playfulness, bullying, fear, confusion, stubbornness, secretiveness, desire, and the gathering of kids. Well male kids anyway. This is a special film by a special director. Highly recommended.

 

Double Suicide (1968), Masahiro Shinoda. Claire Johnston gives us this summary: “This film is a close adaptation of Chikamatsu’s 1720 doll-drama The Double Suicide at Ten No Amijima, and traces a basic conflict in Japanese drama, giri-minjo, between social obligation and personal emotion in the bourgeois milieu. Jihei, married with two children, falls in love with a courtesan, Koharu. As there is no possibility of being together in this world, Jihei sees the only solution as double suicide. When Koharu appears unwilling to die with him, he temporarily abandons her. Eventually, following a mandated divorce, Jihei and Koharu commit suicide together.” Filmed in kabuki-style, Double Suicide begins with puppeteers setting up for performance before it begins to tell the story. We also have a number of black-clad people populating scenes (kurago or puppeteers who manipulate the banuku puppets), moving props, and generally reminding us of Death! The camera is fluid, the sets rudimentary, the close-ups intense, the black and white cinematography stark, and the acting broad. The artificiality distances us from the action. Like the kurago, we witness the action but are unable to enter it. Of course, the end is clear from the beginning. Eroticism, Shinoda appears to say, when divorced from duty results in death. This is bleak. Interestingly, the two women, the courtesan Koharu and the wife Osan (both played by Shima Iwashita), share a mutual respect. As for the filming, we have odd compositions, freeze-frames, bizarre sets, and the black-clad kurago puppeteers moving about. All of this reminds us that narrative is manipulative, cunning, and institutional. The film is as much about narrative itself as it is about a double suicide or the tragedy of love.