Yasujiro Ozu, born this day

Grave of the Fireflies (1988)

When you mention Grave of the Fireflies to someone who’s seen it, they give you a rueful grin. “Saddest movie ever,” they say, or something like that.

I’ve seen Grave of the Fireflies three times: most recently in advance of a screening happening at TIFF Bell Lightbox, here in Toronto, next month. I don’t know if I’ll be attending that screening or not, but I did want to write about it, to help promote the film, and hopefully entice you, if you haven’t seen Grave of the Fireflies, to go. Because sometimes, it’s good to be sad. And when it comes to being good, and very, very sad, Grave of the Fireflies is nearly unparalleled.

Mikio Naruse, born this day

Red Sorghum (1987)

Red is everything in Red Sorghum. It places the elements that matter most to the film along one continuum: binding the sacred, like ceremonial garb, to the profane: crops, wine, sex, and blood. It symbolizes birth and death—the big concepts—but also the living in between. It is everything.

Red Sorghum marked the directorial debut of Zhang Yimou, a man who appreciated the power of colour. A noted cinematographer, Zhang had brought his vision to Chen Kaige’s Yellow Earth three years before. He’d distinguished that film’s vast landscapes from an equally vast sky with forceful use of yellow, green, and brown against blue. Now, helming a film of his own, he chose a scarlet pallet both lurid and violent.

Kenji Mizoguchi, born this day

Flowing (1956)

Some say Otsuta needs a man. What they really mean is that Otsuta needs money.

Money, and how to get it, is the ongoing concern in Flowing, Mikio Naruse’s tale of down-and-out geishas in mid-century Tokyo. Otsuta’s geisha dwelling, Tsuta House, is deep in debt, and it’s her fault: the result of her love-affair with a man who took more than he gave. But Tsuta House still survives, and that, too, is thanks to Otsuta (Isuzu Yamada), whose fame, beauty, and mastery of traditional geisha arts continue to draw customers to her business.

Repast (1951)

You think you know Setsuko Hara.

I discovered the Japanese actress the same way, I bet, that a lot of you did: through the works of her friend, and favourite director, Yasujiro Ozu. Ozu’s ‘Noriko Trilogy’—so-called because all three films starred Hara as a woman named Noriko—are considered among his best work. Given Ozu’s stature, that makes them three of the best films ever made.

Hara worked for other directors, of course, but I’d never seen an example. And until I did, I didn’t realize how wholly the actress and the Noriko character were merged in my mind. It wasn’t simply Noriko who possessed that infinite patience, that commitment to self-sacrifice, that smile of steel—those were, for me, Hara’s traits too. And that made Repast, a major work by director Mikio Naruse, starring Hara, revelatory for me in a way that it might not be for everybody. Here, for the first time, I saw Hara look… grumpy. That was big.

When a Woman Ascends the Stairs (1960)

‘Mama’ is only 30-years old. But in Mama’s line of work, that’s old indeed. She’s a hostess in a nightclub in the Ginza, a wealthy section of Tokyo, and over the five years she’s worked there she’s built a reputation as one of the loveliest, most engaging members of her profession around. The trouble is, no one wants to be a hostess for five years.

Dragnet Girl (1933)

To those of us who have seen Yasujiro Ozu’s masterpieces (Tokyo Story being the most famous of them), the silent films he made early in his career can seem strange. Ironically, it’s their familiarity that makes them so. Ozu’s mature works are famously minimalist: conservative in style, slow and contemplative in pace, alike in subject matter. But much of his early work, influenced by Hollywood and his own studio masters, has a more populist feel. This was an artist in search of himself.

He did not find what he was looking for with Dragnet Girl, a gangster (!) film with characters more reminiscent of Mikio Naruse’s later work than Ozu’s. But though Dragnet Girl is an anomaly even among Ozu’s silent films—and far from the best of them—it is still interesting to watch. Especially when considering the roles Ozu assigned to both women and children later on.

Early Summer (1951)

A relative of mine, who would never claim to be a literary scholar, on the subject of Jane Austen, once offered me this: ‘for someone who never married and had no kids, that woman sure understood how families work.’

She meant power games, and the pressures family members place upon one another, and the conflicts between different generations, and even between different families. And she was right: Austen had rare insight into those things. But it was also interesting, to me, that she saw the single, childless Austen as an outsider looking in; as though, without those additional life experiences, one could not normally be expected to understand how families really worked.

Austen was close to her family for the entirety of her short life. Yasujiro Ozu was close to his, too. He died at 60, in 1963, having predeceased his mother, with whom he lived, by only a couple of years. He, too, left behind no spouse, and no offspring. But the director did leave behind a body of work profound in its examination of the family dynamic—the comforts, cruelties, and most importantly, inevitabilities of a life lived with others.

Among Ozu’s acknowledged masterpieces (a canon that also includes Late Spring (1949); Tokyo Story (1953); and Floating Weeds (1959)) it is Early Summer that focuses most fixedly on family structures. The household in Early Summer is a relatively happy, stable, and normal one, composed of two elderly parents, their unmarried daughter, their married son and his wife, and two young grandsons. And several pet birds. The family members get along, mostly; everyone is healthy, and money is good.

Today's Photo: Yasujiro Ozu (born this day)

An Inn in Tokyo (1935)

If I told you this film felt slow, what would you think of me?

Would you question my patience? Even my taste? An Inn in Tokyo’s an Ozu film, after all; part of a body of work famed for its stately pacing. Ozu never, ever rushed. Part of any true film fan’s maturation is discovering his work, falling in sync with its gentle rhythms, and learning to love the way its images unfold. You don’t make time for Ozu movies; they give you time.

And Ozu’s best films make the waiting worth it. But An Inn in Tokyo, one of the master director’s lesser-known silents, doesn’t always do that.