Late Ozu

reviewed by dave heaton

Take a DVD of any Yasujiro Ozu film and skip through the chapters, watching the first few seconds of each, and you’ll experience the film as a near-still life portrait of places without people: train stations, bridges, residential streets, town squares, harbors. To do this is to imagine Ozu as a landscape artist, capturing Japanese towns and cities in moments of quiet, as Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami did with his 2003 tribute Five Dedicated to Ozu. This is not rewriting history, but highlighting a particular side of Ozu’s art. The camera captures the passing of time by using quiet, nearly still moments in between stories of people and the drama of everyday life. These moments poignantly remind us that time moves on. A train passes, waves roll in to the shore, laundry blows in the wind, the sun rises and sets.

That is in keeping with the seasonal focus of so many Ozu titles. The five films included in the Late Ozu box set all bear titles with an awareness of time’s passing: Early Spring, Tokyo Twilight, Equinox Flower, Late Autumn and The End of Summer. But by taking us into and out of human stories, these scenes also tie people to places. They’re an integral part of the way Ozu depicts communities, the way he places communities of people in a larger context while telling stories from within them.

Each of the films collected in Late Ozu is a story of a family, yet also a story of the larger community it is part of. His films are populated with communities, not just characters. 1956’s Early Spring focuses on the lives of young office workers, but never separates them from their families and friends, or their surroundings. The family stories in Ozu’s films are nearly always centered on marriage, and often on expectations parents have for their children, and vice versa, in regards to marriage. A prototypical Late Ozu plot point involves a daughter who wishes to marry, or not marry, against her parents’ wishes. 1960’s Late Autumn revisits the plot of Ozu’s 1949 film Late Spring, with a daughter rejecting marriage so as not to leave a single parent alone. In 1958’s Equinox Flower, the central character is a stubborn father, bewildered by daughters who reject arranged marriage as old-fashioned, taking their individual freedom to love who they choose as a certainty of modern life. 1961’s The End of Summer applies humor to similar scenarios of differing generational attitudes towards marriage and life and then turns bittersweet, thoughtfully considering the ways times, and people, change.

Ozu’s films deftly handle stories that could be fodder for routine melodrama. The humanism of Ozu’s filmic world –where humor is gently used to explore painful dilemmas and the least likable characters are still treated first as human beings – cannot be overstated. Neither can the role the camera plays in this. It saves the most melodramatic story: 1957’s bleak Tokyo Twilight, where a daughter searches for the mother she never knew while dealing with unwanted pregnancy of her own. Ozu’s last black-and-white film, it is a “soap opera” story filmed as a portrait of loneliness, of solitude. The camera gravitates towards empty rooms, people standing alone in hallways. There are remarkable sequences where the father or daughter characters are shown alone, deep in thought, and then the camera cuts to the sky, to town, to life passing by. The DVD’s notes accurately point out that the film mostly takes places at night, and perceptively note, “It is, appropriately, Ozu’s only postwar film to take place in the dead of winter.”

All of the films in Late Ozu are marked by Ozu’s distinctive filmmaking style, with the camera rarely moving, never close-up, and often low. It is important to observe how that works in the context of storytelling, though. Ozu can be considered one of the great filmmakers not just because his visual style, but because of how he used it to tell stories. That style was refined over his career. There will never be one definitive, take-it-home set of Ozu’s films, as he created over 50 films between 1927 and 1967, and many of the earliest, silent films are lost. Yet Late Ozu does offer a historical look at a particular period of Ozu’s career, one marked by the significant change from black-and-white to color.

The earliest films in the set, Early Spring and Tokyo Twilight, were Ozu’s last two black and white films. The final six films of his career – the three in this set plus the already-released-on-DVD Good Morning and Floating Weeds and the to-be-released final film An Autumn Afternoon - were in color. Watching Equinox Flower, his first color film, for the first time is a remarkable experience, revealing how fully Ozu embraced color as a filmmaking device. The film’s look is bright, but also marked by the use of color as an emotional as well as visual tool. It makes the film’s focus on the human effects of changing times – exemplified by the scene of a group of older men drunkenly singing a song with the line “the warrior ponders, what is this world coming to?” – all the more moving.

These five films stand in testament to Ozu’s filmmaking aesthetic and his skill at telling human stories through film. Yet Late Ozu also tells the story of another community: the actors and film crew that were Ozu’s filmmaking family. He used many of the same actors throughout his career, in both minor and major roles. Setsuko Hara is in three of these films, Chishu Ryu in all five. Shin Saburi is the stubborn father at the center of Equinox Flower and then the friend trying to arrange a marriage for Yoko Tsukasa’s character in Late Autumn. Hara and Yoko Tsukasa star as mother and daughter in Late Autumn, and then play sisters in The End of Summer. The recurring presence of the same people is a reminder of the larger team standing behind any great director’s name. But they also are another means of impressing into these films the larger story that is told within them, that of people and how they relate to each other: the essential story of what it means to be human.

{www.criterion.com}