BFI Top 50: Tokyo Story, Released in 1953, Directed by Yasujiro Ozu

What I know going in

That the film concerns an elderly couple who travel to Tokyo to visit their children, only to be ignored by them.

 

Immediate reaction

Tokyo Story plays like an alternate version of a typical Hollywood melodrama. The basic setup would be right at home in a Douglas Sirk film. Elderly Japanese couple Shukichi (ChishuRyu) and Tomi (Chieko Higashiyama) Hirayama decide to leave their small village and travel to Tokyo to spend a week with their middle-aged children. The Sirk version of this tale would have histrionic scenes about the generation gap and big city versus small town values. It would also be chock full of expressionist bursts of color and immaculately artificial sets (Note: this is not a knock against Sirk, I just recently watched All That Heaven Allows for the first time and found it interesting to compare American and Japanese takes on similar material).

 

Instead, Ozu’s film is subtle and quietly devastating. Shukichi and Omi deal with the parade of difference they are treated to by their children with a surface-level pleasantness that hides the despair and end-of-life melancholy the couple is filming. That it makes it sound like the children are outright antagonistic towards their parents. They aren’t. While the movie doesn’t necessarily portray them positively, there is a frankness to their dismissal of their parents that rings uncomfortably true to even to this 23 year old. The film acknowledges that the children are busy and have lives outside of their parents, which slightly excuses their actions. Even Noriko, the only character who goes out of her way to treat her parents nicely, and it should be noted they are technically her parents-in-law, acknowledges that if the circumstance were different, she probably would have acted in the same manner as the other children.

 

Overall, it was just nice to see a film that deals with big, generational issues in a small way. There has been a string of films in the past decade that treat old age problems as an excuse for wacky hijinks (The Bucket List, It’s Complicated). Tokyo Story is a pleasant antidote to that type of film. The scene where Shukichi and his old friends go out drinking could have easily come off as grating and unfunny, but Ozu transforms it into a sad, mournful reverie for days gone by with a spoonful of humor to make it go down a bit more easily. The only time the film dips into melodrama is when the youngest, unmarried daughter lashes out her siblings, but given that this scene comes right after Tomi has passed away, it works as a welcome release to the desperation that has been underlying the film.

 

Visually, the film is directed with Ozu’s trademarked style. This means a lot of low-angle shots of characters navigating the cramped interiors of their Japanese homes, confronting, head-on shot-reverse-shot conversations, and lingering on rooms even when there are no people within them. Indeed, Ozu gets a lot of mileage out of the sliding doors and frames of Japanese houses. Frequently, Ozue will set a scene with different characters in different receding frames, which sometimes creates an infinity-mirror-like effect. Even the scenes set outside are slashed by pieces of modern architecture creating an uncomfortable claustrophobia when one wouldn’t expect.

 

All that being said, there is still something keeping me from fully embracing Ozu. I don’t know what it is. I appreciate the delicate way he treats human relations and his stylistic rigor, but I would never call Late Spring or Tokyo Story favorite films. I think it has to do with some of the subtlety and connection in the dialogue being lost in translation. If I was fluent in Japanese, or if Ozu’s films were in English, I feel like I would connect with them a lot more. However, I think having to do the subtitle dance of glancing at the bottom of screen to quickly read the dialogue and then looking up to watch the actors’ expressions, is causing me to lose focus and miss some of the more subtle emotions.

 

Further thoughts

I honestly have no idea what else to write. People far smarter than me have written extensively about both the technical and emotional side of Ozu’s film. Again, I don’t know why, but I am just not connecting with Ozu’s films on the level I would like to, which is preventing me from writing anything more insightful.

 

Why is the film on this list?

Ozu’s static, tatami mat camera, focus on small-scale drama, and the cluttered surrounding in which two inhabit, forces intense introspection.