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Tokyo
Story Program Notes
Tokyo
Story by David Brodwell
When
Tokyo Story was relased in late 1953, Western audiences
were just being exposed to Japanese cinema. Akira Kurosawa had
made his breakthrough with Roshamon three years earlier,
and Kenji Mizoguchi was moving to the forefront of the international
festival scene. In 1955, Teinosuke Kinugasa’s Gate of Hell
would win two Academy Awards. The time would have been
right for a very different sort of Japanese film to arrive on
the global stage. Yet Ozu remained unknown abroad, chiefly because
decision makers considered him “too Japanese” to be exported.
Although
other Ozu films were shown sporadically in Europe and the UK,
it was Tokyo Story that broke the barrier. There were
screenings here and there in the mid-1950s, an award from the
British Film Institute in 1958, and screening programs organized
by Donald Richie and other enterprising programmers. Then it
opened in New York in 1972, coinciding with the publication
of Paul Schrader’s Transcendental Style in Film , and
it won the hearts of influential critics. When Richie’s OZU
was published two years later, critics came to realize
that this quiet filmmaker was one of cinema’s finest artists.
In the 1992 and 2002 Sight and Sound international
critics’ polls, Tokyo Story was ranked as one of the
ten greatest films ever made.
The
capricious way in which this film entered world film culture
might make us suspect that its success is accidental. Surely
Late Spring (1949) and Early Summer (1951),
to cite only two examples, are no less excellent? Ozu himself
hinted at a reservation: “This is one of my most melodramatic
pictures.” Yet Tokyo Story turns out to be a remarkably
replete introduction to his distinct world. It contains in miniature
a great many of the qualities that enchant his admirers and
move audiences, no matter how distant, to tears.
There
is, first of all, the mundane story. Ozu and his scriptwriter
Kogo Noda, often centered their plots upon getting a daughter
married, a situation around which an array of characters’ lives
could be revealed. But Tokyo Story lacks even this
minimal plot drive; it carries to a limit Ozu’s faith that everyday
life, rendered tellingly, provides more than enough drama to
engage us deeply. An elderly couple leave the tiny town of Onomichi
to visit their children and grandchildren. Inevitably, they
trouble their hosts; inevitably they feel guilty; inevitably,
the children cut corners and neglect them. In the course of
the trip, the old folks become aware of both virtues and vanities
of their offspring.
This
arc of action conceals a strong and cunning structure. After
leaving their youngest child, Kyoko, behind, the Hirayama’s
are shown visiting their children in descending order. First
they stay with Kiochi and his family, then with Shige and hers,
then with Noriko (who married their third-born child), and finally
with young Keizo in Osaka . Off screen they have visited Keizo
first en route to Tokyo, but Ozu and his scenarist, Yoshikata
Yoda, portray only their stopover during their return trip –
partly to allow us to form expectations about how hospitable
their youngest son will be, but also to respect the family-tree
structure. (Ozu had experimented with this device in his first
extended-family film, Brothers and Sisters of the Toda Family
[1941].)
This
patterning would seem overneat were it not carefully buried
in a wealth of details of gesture and speech, from the frantic
energy if the grandsons (one whistles the theme from John Ford’s
Stagecoach) to the plaintiveness of the elderly father’s
fretting over their sons’ failures. Again and again, personality
emerges through concise comparisons. The businesswoman, Shige,
is hard-headed enough to pack a funeral kimono for the trip
home, but it never occurs to Noriko that someone may die, so
she is unprepared. Who can say which woman is the more virtuous?
Jane Austen, Anton Chekhov - these are the artists who come
to mind when we confront a story told through such tactful revelations
of temperament and stated of mind. Yet there is nothing mild
about Ozu’s tact; it acquires a stringent poignancy. “What a
treat,” reflects Tomi, “to sleep in my dead son’s bed.”
Tokyo
Story also exemplifies
Ozu’s unique style – utilizing low camera height, 180-degree
cuts, virtually no camera movement and shots linked through
overlapping bits of space. In dialogue scenes Ozu refuses to
cut away from a speaking character; it’s as if every person
has the right to be heard in full. Other films use his distinctive
techniques more playfully, but here he seems chiefly concerned
with creating a quiet world against which his characters’ personalities
stand out.
The
same delicate poise emerges in a refusal to tilt the scales.
It would be easy to sentimentalize Shukichi, for instance, but
when he staggers back drunk from his reunion, Shige remarks
how he’s reverted to this old ways, the implication is that
his carousing once caused family problems. The warm-hearted
Noriko confesses to forgetting occasionally about her dead husband,
measuring herself against a cruelly high standard. Likewise,
most of the siblings aren’t deeply selfish, just preoccupied
and caught up in the lives they have made for themselves.
Thanks
to Ozu’s compassionate detachment, the final scenes take on
enormous richness of feeling as we watch characters contemplate
their futures. Noriko smiling tells Kyoko that “life is disappointing”;
Shukichi assures Noriko that she must remarry; the neighbor
jovially warns Shukichi that now he’ll be lonely. Yet the momentous
revelations are tempered by the poetic resonance of everyday
acts and objects. Shukichi greets a beautiful sunrise – signaling
another day of brisk fanning and plucking at one’s kimono. An
ordinary wristwatch links mother, daughter and daughter-in-law
in a lineage of hard-earned female wisdom. And the roar of a
train dies down, leaving only the throbbing of a boat in the
bay.
Tokyo
Story Discussion Questions:
The
visual links between the scenes in Tokyo Story are
often shots of the railroad, as well as of Tokyo during the
post war building boom. Apart from showing the changes in the
country itself, how do these images also tell of the inevitable,
growing distance between the parents and their sons and daughters?
In
the scenes with the grandchildren we see a rather chilling development.
Although the first generation acts with traditional respect
while their parents at least are in the room, the second generation
shows no respect whatsoever, most pointedly when the grandson
goes for a walk with Tomi and picks flowers for himself. What
do the scenes with the third generation seem to indicate for
the future of the family?
The
widowed daughter-in-law, Noriko, has been described by some
critics as the hope for the future. What are the qualities that
cause her to be described in this fashion, and why is it significant
that she is not a blood relation?
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