Reviews and notes

Ozu's best known and most idolized film in the West (after a belated release), TOKYO STORY has now found a place in critics' and filmmakers' lists among the very greatest films ever made. No Ozu film featured in the Sight & Sound ten-yearly Top 10 from 1952 to 1982, but TOKYO STORY ranked behind only perennial poll-toppers Citizen Kane and La R?gle du jeu in the 1992 list. Ozu was so consistent a filmmaker that it's exceedingly difficult to make distinctions of quality between his films. TOKYO STORY has been singled out not so much because it is that much better than his other films, but probably because it is a little different: it has a death in it and so is presumably considered more action-packed.
-Andrew Langridge, NZ Federation of Film Societies.


Ozu described TOKYO MONOGATARI as his "most melodramatic" movie, an observation taken by most western commentators, dazzled by the director's minimalist style and resolutely quotidian material, as ironic. But irony was never Ozu's preferred tone, and his comment surely reflected the film's uncharacteristic explicitness: this is an almost didactic film about the disintegration of Japanese family values, full of characters and incidents designed to spell out social and psychological points with diagrammatic clarity.

Although it is not a precise match with any other Ozu film in theme, tone or structure, TOKYO MONOGATARI obviously shares characteristics and concerns with many of them. Its interests in parent/offspring relations, in urban/rural contrasts, and in the evanescence of happiness are all entirely consonant with earlier films... It also uses most of Ozu's well-known visual tropes, from the use of low camera-positions for domestic interiors to patterns of cutting based on visual analogies rather than conventional eyeline-matches. What's different here, is, again, the overall explicitness of the film's aim. The fact that this is a film in which the main characters frequently and directly discuss the issues that confront them (for example, parents' disappointment in their childrens levels of assessment, or a young woman's disgust at her elder sister's uncaring meanness) militates against both the psychological nuancing and the structural playfulness that Ozu elsewhere used freely.

In part, the film's overt seriousness springs from its persistent undercurrent of social commentary. This is absolutely a film of its moment: it faithfully records everything from Tokyo's post-war rebuilding boom to the raucous and hedonistic behaviour of young people in a hot-spring hotel, the latter an early sign of the 'Sun Tribe' delinquency that was to become Japan's hottest social topic only three years later. (Since Ozu and Noda habitually retreated to hot-spring resorts themselves to work on their scripts, it's amusing to speculate that they themselves had experienced the same kind of sleepless night suffered by the Hirayama couple.) Equally topical was the core theme of the chasm between traditionalist, rural parents and their city-based sons and daughters; the breakdown in age-old family support structures in the years of American occupation and 'democratisation' was a widely discussed topic in the early 1950s. And the financial plights of Koichi and Shige, one struggling to run a suburban medical practice, the other managing a tawdry hair salon, both in conspicuously unfashionable areas of the city, are observed with the same fastidious eye for social and economic demographics...

The film's soundtrack is dominated by three elements: chirping crickets, boats chugging and sounding their sirens, and train noises. The crickets evoke the rural ambience of Onomichi, while the other two sound elements evoke travel and the space between places - and by extension, people. But Ozu is far too subtle and humane an artist to reduce his sound design to a matter of schematic symbols. In a film concerned with constant journeying, it's significant that the only shot of anyone in the act of travelling is the image of Noriko on the train back to Tokyo in the end. In the shot, she pulls out Tomi's heirloom, the pocket watch, and examines it with deep emotion. The shot mysteriously clinches the association between the idea (or sound) of travel and the motif of evanescence. This may be the least 'melodramatic' moment in the film. It is also probably the most truly Ozu-esque.
-Tony Rayns, Sight and Sound, February 1994.




2001 screening: 16mm
2005 screening: 35mm, as part of a major Ozu Centenary Retrospective

Weblink: Review by Arthur Lazere

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