A Trick of the Light

Kore-eda Hirokazu's first feature Maborosi is so lovely. It's a sad meditation on loss and learning to live with it, and I loved it, obviously. I love Kor-eda so much. I thought this movie was rather cold for most of its running time – it's shot in long shot for most of its running time; there are very few close-ups and we spend so much time so far away from these characters. But as it ended I burst into tears and had trouble stopping crying as my friends started talking about the movie. It's a lovely movie, and maybe one of the reasons I loved it is that it feels very Ozu. It's Kore-eda's first feature, and my friend Malia suggested that perhaps he was referencing Ozu a lot here, as he figured out his own style. There is no one better to imitate, so I think this makes perfect sense. 

The title in Japanese, incidentally, means something like a trick of the light. I watched this with my unseen movie club. I have no idea how we got ahold of it.

Stray Dog (1949)

Stray Dog (野良犬) is an analysis of postwar Japan and the disaffection and poverty experienced by many veterans and their families. It is a generational analysis of urban life like the kind Mizoguchi and Ozu were making in this period. I hadn't seen this movie before, so I hadn't known Kurosawa was making movies like this too. But Stray Dog blew me away. It's all of this hidden inside a detective movie. This film is atmospheric and rich – the entire film is sweat soaked, and you can feel the heat. It's easily comparable to postwar American films noirs. But Stray Dog has so much humanity! The ending is just devastating. It absolutely broke my heart. I loved this film. 

Also... Toshiro Mifune was, like, really handsome in the late 1940s.

Good Morning (1959)

I think the most stunning thing about Ozu's Good Morning is that not only does it have Ozu's usual Chekhovian nuance of sweetness, sadness, finely observed character study, and humor, but Good Morning also has very broad farce! A fart joke is a running bit in this film, and the plot follows two small boys who stop speaking to their parents because they won't buy a television for the house. It's quite hilarious! Much funnier than most Ozu films but sacrificing none of his usual detail.

Good Morning is a perfect film. In fact, all of Ozu's films are perfect. Is Ozu Yasujirō the best film director to ever live? I am convinced that he is.

The Master

A couple summers ago I watched my first Ozu Yasujirō film. I was getting slightly obsessed with mid-century Japanese film, and for some reason I was watching a lot of them.

Tokyo Story

For me, if a film is in the Criterion Collection, this means I should probably watch it. I don't know how everyone else feels about this collection, but that is what it means to me. When I started watching lots and lots of movies at age 16 or so, I followed the Academy Award nominations. I figured that was the best way to pick and choose which films were important among the enormous collections on Turner Classic Movies and at my local video rental store (we still had mostly VHS tapes back then). But, of course, although the Academy thankfully just invited a huge number of international members to the Academy, the Oscars have usually skewed very American, and so following the Academy as a guide for what to watch has meant missing a lot of things. This is where the Criterion Collection has come in.

And because so many of these films from the Japanese masters are in the Criterion Collection, a couple of summers ago I watched a whole bunch of them: Ozu's Late Spring, Naruse Mikio's When a Woman Ascends the Stairs, Mizoguchi Kenji's Sansho the Bailiff and Ugetsu, Ichikawa Kon's Fires on the Plain and The Burmese Harp, Teshigahara Hiroshi's Woman in the Dunes. All in rapid succession. Ichikawa was definitely my favorite at the time. I loved his camera-work and his anti-war politics, especially.

But in the last two weeks I finally saw Early Summer and Tokyo Story, two Ozu movies from the same period. And I have fallen in love again.

Early Summer

For starters, I should register embarrassment for not having seen Tokyo Story before now - it is frequently named as one of the greatest films of all time. But 2016, apparently, is a summer for making up for these gaps in my film history (I also finally watched Andrei Rublev this summer).  

Tokyo Story recalls Leo McCarey's Make Way for Tomorrow or Randolph Edmonds' play Old Man Pete - in which the now-adult children of an old married couple send for their parents to visit but once they're there are annoyed that they need to disrupt the usual way of living their lives. In Tokyo Story, the rural parents also need to navigate the city of Tokyo, its speed and industry and impersonality. Ozu's camera doesn't move very much. These are character and cultural studies, and he expects us to pay close attention and to think about what we are seeing.

I liked Early Summer even better. In fact, Early Summer is basically a perfect movie. In this film, Noriko, a woman in her late twenties who has been focused on her career, is being pestered by her relatives into marrying. But she chooses a husband for herself instead and makes her own path in life. This film spends lots of time with Noriko and her friends, some married and some single, discussing the difficulties of dealing with a husband or being lonely. This is all fun and funny and slightly catty, but the film is also fundamentally about getting older and figuring out what has been chosen for us and how we might choose differently.

Another thing that I really loved about both of these films is the way that the war is constantly present in these characters' lives. In both, there is a missing young man, a brother or husband who has died in World War II. Neither film makes this into a central concern for the characters, but it is always there. One feels this absence palpably. I love this aspect of the movies.

And both of these films have so many great performers. My favorites in both were Miyake Kuniko (so understated and beautiful, especially in Early Summer) and Takahashi Toyo (hilarious in both). But honestly, there are so many beautiful performances in these movies.

In any case I am excited to see more. Ozu was fairly prolific, so I expect there are a lot of superb films out there for me to watch.

Two from J-pan

I'm just becoming acquainted with Yasujirō Ozu. I recently rented Late Spring, which is probably his most famous movie. It's a romantic comedy. Very cute, but incredibly smart. It's about a woman who is a little older than normal marrying age (late spring, get it?) who lives with her widowed father and takes care of him. In order to get her to marry, the father pretends he is going to remarry. This is an incredibly beautiful, lyrical movie about two people who love each other very, very much but have to part. I fell in love with it immediately. The lead actress in the film, Setsuko Hara is beguiling and beautiful, and I fell in love with her as well. Her smile will make you melt, I promise. Ozu is well known to American audiences, so it's kind of embarassing that it has taken me so long to see one of his films. I should never have waited. The next one is one its way.

I also caught Isao Takahata's 1988 anime film Grave of the Fireflies, which is about two young orphans whose parents are killed during the bombings on Tokyo in World War II. The two go to live with their monster of an aunt for a while, but finally shove off on their own. The film begins with the death of the boy, so I guess it isn't giving too much away to say that this is a sad movie that does not end well. The thing is, saying that the movie is sad doesn't do Grave of the Fireflies justice at all. It's easily the saddest animated film I've ever seen. I was a mess. The portrait of devastation in Japan is incredibly moving and this story of a brother and sister trying to survive in the wake of war knows how to pull on its audience's heartstrings. Takahata knows what he's doing, too. He is influenced by the Japanese masters and his work reflects classic Japanese cinema. He even composes one of his shots to look exactly like a famous shot in Kon Ichikawa's Fires on the Plain.