Late Ozu

by David Sterritt

Given all the half truths circulating about Yasujiro Ozu, it's a wonder his artistic reputation has flourished so vigorously. Even well-meaning critics have hung misleading tags on him, making his films sound esoteric and demanding. His stock has risen anyway, thanks to open-minded moviegoers willing to embrace films built on subtle insights and small epiphanies, at once wholly artificial—every detail is meticulously arranged by an artist of legendary patience—and as fully, deeply human as anything in cinema. Apart from the Criterion Collection's new release of "Late Ozu," only half a dozen of his fifty-three features are readily available on DVD, so there's a long way to go before he's a household name. But this is a marvelous contribution to the cause.

Before getting to the films, a word about those half truths. Ozu is the most Japanese of all Japanese directors, the story goes. His interests are fixated on family life and slow-burning domestic conflict, and he cares little about social or political issues. His invariably static camera sits just off the floor, like a guest on a tatami mat, and his 360-degree camera positions are an interesting eccentricity. Ditto for his long delays before accepting technical innovations like sound and color. And while many directors have acknowledged making essentially the same movie throughout their careers, Ozu pushed the idea to its limits, rarely venturing beyond a constricted set of themes, storylines, and editing patterns. Even experts have been snookered by some of these notions, and when they "explain" the director along these lines, they reinforce the impression that his movies are austere, obsessive, and definitely an acquired taste—wholesome and nutritious, maybe, but not tasty enough to try very often.

It's not hard to poke holes in most of the Ozu myths. Calling him the most Japanese director assumes we know what "Japaneseness" is, and why Ozu's lifelong love of American filmmakers—Lubitsch, Lloyd, Borzage, Welles, Ford—didn't dilute it. (Ozu had few qualms about learning and refining his craft through "extreme imitations" of American movies, according to Kiju Yoshida, his mentor.) Of course he was fascinated by domestic drama, but he also made nonsense comedies and gangster pictures; he depicts the workplace and the neighborhood saloon as well as the home; and he often examines family ideology under stressful conditions that bring out its weaknesses more than its strengths. Ozu's recycling of storylines, themes, and so forth was prompted in part by studio preferences and box-office returns, but also by his esthetic passion for rhythmic repetition, incremental change, productive tensions between stasis and flux, and the endless possibilities of theme-and-variation structures. He was slow to accept new technical resources because he was doing fine without them and preferred to wait until the kinks had been worked out. Regarding his idiosyncratic visuals, film scholar David Bordwell showed twenty years ago that Ozu used occasional camera movements until the late 1950s and organized his 360-degree space with exquisite care, angling shots at multiples of fifteen degrees vis-à-vis the central point of interest. The camera is rarely at eye level, despite countless claims to the contrary, but shoots from low positions to about halfway up the height of the main subject; so conversing characters don't look into the camera but over it. All this may sound like technical trivia to some, but with Ozu's work the angel is in the details.

Since the works in "Late Ozu" date from the director's last filmmaking years, a bit of historical perspective is in order. Ozu directed his first movie, the silent Sword of Penitence, in 1927. He first impressed American audiences when his final film, An Autumn Afternoon, was shown in the first New York Film Festival in 1963, and he became an art-theater favorite when his 1953 masterpiece Tokyo Story played New York in 1972. Most critics divide his films into an early period, ending with the unsuccessful A Hen in the Wind in 1948, and a "mature" period, starting with the masterly Late Spring in 1949. This oversimplifies the case, but generally speaking the post-1948 films are more sober in tone and more minimalist in style, paring away fades, dissolves, traveling shots, and such until they pretty much vanish. The later works also mark the full blossoming of Ozu's collaborations with Kôgo Noda, his longtime coscreenwriter and drinking buddy, and Yuuharu Atsuta, his frequent cinematographer from the early Forties on. Critics of Noël Burch's stripe say Ozu's work went downhill after 1948, but the five films in "Late Ozu" make an argument for the defense that I find irrefutable. Steeped in Ozu's distinctive esthetic yet amazingly varied in story, atmosphere, and tone, they cry out for careful viewing by anyone with even a passing interest in this utterly original artist.

Ozu made most of his movies for the Shochiku studio, which specialized in "home dramas" about ordinary people facing commonplace crises. By the time he started Early Spring (1956), however, the realistic shomingeki was losing ground to more up-to-date fare like science fiction and pop-music romps. Eager to regain the leading position it had recently lost to the upstart Daiei studio, Shochiku encouraged its staff directors, including Ozu, to try more "modern" approaches. One result was an increased emphasis on melodrama—of special interest where Ozu is concerned, since commentators like David Desser have taken his statement that Tokyo Story was "one of [his] most melodramatic pictures" as a mildly self-deprecating remark. Be that as it may, Early Spring is melodramatic to its bones, and brilliantly so.

The story centers on Shoji (Ryo Ikebe), a married "salaryman" whose low-level job in a Tokyo office provides little satisfaction aside from the companionship of his colleagues. One of them, a secretary nicknamed Goldfish (Keiko Kishi), seduces him into an extramarital affair. They keep it secret for a while, but eventually Shoji's wife finds out about it (gossip, lipstick stains, the usual), whereupon she and Shoji separate. In the story's remarkable denouement, Shoji accepts a transfer to a remote branch of his company; his wife returns to him; and the two stand at a window of their new home in Mitsuishi, trying to persuade themselves that living in this bleak industrial wasteland is just the thing to get their marriage back on track, and hey, Tokyo isn't that far away, and anyway, it's only for a few years.

This is a finale that the Douglas Sirk of All That Heaven Allows (1955) and The Tarnished Angels (1958) would have been proud of, and other elements of Early Spring also recall Sirk's pessimistic vision of modern life. An office worker named Miura does nothing in the film but sicken and die. Characters ceaselessly express dislike for their jobs, restlessness with their routines, and fear about their futures, and Ozu's severe mise-en-scène offers ample visual support for their complaints. His declared purpose in Early Spring was to show the dissolution of a salaryman's hopes as he realizes that "even though he has worked for years, he has accomplished nothing." (This film does for the Japanese "economic miracle" what various Fassbinder films do for the German one.) Ozu wasn't a political artist, especially in his postwar period of elliptically told middle-class dramas, but he wasn't entirely apolitical either; only a filmmaker with strong opinions could have Shoji's wife listen to the sappy reminiscing of over-the-hill military men and remark, "With soldiers like that, no wonder Japan lost the war!" Ozu's deeply critical portrait of contemporary Japan, industrialized and Westernized in ways that were unthinkable a decade earlier, is astringent and acute. Early Spring may not have jump-started Shochiku's fortunes as the studio hoped, but it certainly brought fresh relevance to the home-drama genre.

Ozu's next movie again focuses on young characters, and its overtones are even more darksome; if Early Spring is Sirkian melodrama, Tokyo Twilight (1957) is film noir, swept by philosophical shadows and haunted by implacable death. Ozu's favorite actor and almost exact contemporary, Chishu Ryu, plays Shukichi, the aging father of young Akiko (Ineko Arima) and married Takako, played by Setsuko Hara, whose ready smile and melancholy eyes are as closely identified with Ozu's films as Ryu's amiable features and expressive voice. Scuttling the leisurely exposition of most late Ozu films, the narrative quickly informs us that trouble is afoot: Takako is leaving her husband, a mild-seeming man who's taken to drowning himself in alcohol and taking out his frustrations on her and their infant child. Then unmarried Akiko learns she's pregnant and both sisters discover that their supposedly dead mother actually ran off with a lover years ago, and now runs a mah-jongg parlor not far from where they live. Recriminations, abortion, and suicide follow.

Commentaries like to point out that Tokyo Twilight is the only postwar Ozu film set during the dead of Japan's bone-chilling winter. Many of the film's elements are downbeat and dreary, from its frequent nighttime scenes and unpleasant characters to its pitiless view of a Japanese family riven by secrets, lies, and betrayals. In no other film does Hara look as careworn, unhappy, and beaten down by life as she does here. Tokyo Twilight was the first Ozu film in twenty-one years not to reach the top ten in the annual poll conducted by Japan's respected Kinema Jumpo magazine. Seen today, it emerges as one of Ozu's most profoundly modern works, sounding psychological and sociological depths that Ozu never probed so fearlessly before or since.

Equinox Flower (1958) is Ozu's first color film, and it's a stunning one. The gentle comedy's main character, businessman Wataru (Shin Saburi), is caught up in a string of marital dilemmas: His older daughter Setsuko (Arima) doesn't want the arranged marriage he's planned on; his male friend Shukichi (Ryu) is upset that his daughter has moved in with a musician; his female friend Hatsu (Chieko Naniwa) is pushing her reluctant daughter to wed a physician who's treating her; and so on. The story's big irony is that while Wataru thinks he's modern and progressive, his support of youthful independence crumbles when his own offspring are involved. The film's big joke is a mischievous (if implausible) ruse that tricks him into allowing Setsuko to marry as she pleases, however much he still dislikes the idea.

Ozu's unerring sense of color is obvious from the moment we see Wataru's younger daughter decked out in a dazzling pink sweater, just the garment to complement her perky chitchat about love and marriage, postwar Japanese style. According to one of his camera operators, Ozu's preference for muted colors made him dislike Agfacolor's red and Eastmancolor's blue, but he decided he could live with Agfa in the end. Intentionally or not, his alluring use of red became a trademark of his last movies, and the appropriately titled Equinox Flower is where it started. If the film is less resonant than its two predecessors, it's because the aging matinee idol Saburi looks right as Wataru but speaks and moves like even more of a stiff than the uncool character is supposed to be. Still, anyone looking for Ozu's most charming side will do better here than with the overrated comedy Good Morning that followed it in 1959.

Late Autumn (1960) is a much-modified remake of Late Spring, the 1949 masterpiece that kicked off Ozu's late period. Again a young person (Ayako, played by Yoko Tsukasa) is encouraged by a widowed parent (Akiko, played by Hara) to get married, and again the parent talks about remarrying in order to cajole the youngster. Late Autumn gives more weight to the younger side of the equation, though, and allows more independence to the single parent of the story. Japan was roiled in 1960 by the scheduled renewal of the Japanese-American Security Treaty, which touched off controversy and violence; in this atmosphere Late Autumn was seen by Japanese critics like Tadao Sato as blinkered, backward-looking, and out of touch. Yet while this isn't one of Ozu's most invigorating works, it offers a near-perfect balance between the persuasive pull of tradition and the unstoppable sway of Westernized modernity. Ozu's sociopolitical side surfaces again, subtly but surely, in this portrait of postwar realities rubbing uneasily against their prewar counterparts. And his cinematic skills are as strong as ever, not least in his brilliant casting of Hara, the daughter of Late Spring, as the deeply sympathetic mother here.

Ozu's penultimate film, The End of Summer (1961), is actually called Kohayakawake no aki, which means The Autumn of the Kohayakawaka Family, a more accurate title for one of his most far-reaching portrayals of a clan facing personal, professional, and historical change. Bordwell has observed that right after World War II, sixty percent of Japan's workers labored in middle-class family businesses; most of these were defunct by the time this film was made, and their disappearance split many extended families into small nuclear households, forcing new challenges on Japanese society. Coming to grips with such changes, The End of Summer stresses emotion over analysis in Ozu's usual manner, but this doesn't diminish the story's strength as psychological drama and social commentary. The central character is Manbei Kohayakawaka, a feisty patriarch who's ignoring economic threats to the family sake-brewing business, preferring to frolic and carouse in ways his relatives find anything but age appropriate. In a plot twist based on a real-life incident Ozu knew of, Manbei collapses and lies near death for a night, only to spring up the next morning as if nothing had happened. But like the stopgaps and excuses his relatives fall back on while hardships draw near, his well-being is precarious and doomed to collapse. Ozu doesn't indulge in scatological humor nearly as often as critics like Bordwell and Donald Richie claim, but this is one of the rare pictures where he does seem a trifle naughty at times. Far more important is his use of Manbei's declining sense of order as a metaphor for the morphing face of Japanese society.

Vastly more can be said about "Late Ozu," but there's no substitute for simply watching the films. Each of them is emotionally rich, psychologically true, intellectually exact, stylistically nimble, and as entertaining as can be, drawing on finely tuned strategies whose narrative punch—comic, tragic, dramatic, romantic, and every stop in between--is all the stronger for their bold refusal of standard movie conventions. Among the people who visited Ozu as he lay dying of cancer was Shochiku studio chief Shiro Kido, and it's said that Ozu murmured into the ear of his longtime supporter, "Well, Mr. President, after all, the home drama." Like that dark joke at that disquieting moment, Ozu's cinematic home dramas are at once engaging, challenging, and ultimately inexhaustible to the inquiring mind. A zillion thanks to the Criterion Collection for expanding its Ozu filmography with these wondrous late works.

David Sterritt is chairman of the National Society of Film Critics and adjunct professor at Columbia University and the Maryland Institute College of Art.

To buy Yasujiro Ozu DVDs click here

Cineaste,Vol.XXXIII No.1 2007

Comments

(There are no comments yet)

Leave a comment: