So thoroughly does Ozu rely on his 360-degree playing space that it becomes a default value, an oddly “transparent” norm to which we quickly become accustomed. For more striking effects he goes beyond his quirky dialogue cutting to a thoroughgoing organization of each image. He is as much an editing-based director as Mizoguchi is a staging-based one, but both seek to activate every zone of the frame. Shots empty of human presence will be linked through overlapping furnishings, or congruent shadows, or similar objects (hats, lamps). Even when characters are present, to follow an object or background figure through a procession of Ozu shots is to take an adventure in pictorial design. Subtle changes in camera setups allow him to bring props and secondary characters into prominence; during the twenty-three shots in the death scene in Where Now Are the Dreams of Youth? (1932), not a single camera position is repeated, and minute differences among them enrich the dramatic flow. Often, when we return to a locale, the new scene will notably recast the shot order of the first, providing an almost structuralist table of permutations and a faint echo of earlier actions.
What Did the Lady Forget? proved his last frivolous film for some time, and he bowed to government demands for films exalting the Japanese spirit. But his experimentation with dramatic tone and with every element of cinematic expression continued, albeit in more muted form. In Brothers and Sisters of the Toda Family (1941), the kindly father dies unexpectedly, and the older children are obligated to take in his widow and youngest daughter. But the pair is thoughtlessly shunted from one household to another. Ozu’s first extended-family film, Toda Family is a rough draft for Tokyo Story, but it has a flavor all its own, quietly suggesting that traditional family hierarchies must be set aside when a younger generation—here the happygo-lucky junior son—proves ready to take responsibility. And the film ends with a deflating joke that can make you rub your eyes. Full of casual swagger, the son announces, “I’ll get married when Hitler does,” and then he flees to the beach when an attractive woman comes calling.
Much more unvarying in tone is There Was a Father (1942), a simple story of a teacher who spends his life expiating for a boating accident, obliging his son to stick to his duty even though they must live apart. The propaganda message is clear, and unusually for him, Ozu steeps his story in Buddhist iconography. Yet a placid pictorial experimentation shines through: layers of hospital beds revealing tiny faces in crevices, empty landscapes over which sound echoes mournfully. In this film and Toda Family, we are already in the world of late Ozu, when the stylistic audacity is less flagrant, the humor emerges in flashes, and every scene aims to achieve a delicate poignancy.
AFTER THE WAR THE JAPANESE CINEMA MODERNIZED AGAIN, bringing forward a younger generation (Kurosawa, Ichikawa, Imai). Ozu and Mizoguchi refused to update their technique and favorite genres. Although they came to seem oldfashioned, Shochiku’s most distinguished director could afford to continue refining his approach through a cycle of films about youthful marriage and approaching old age. Indeed, Ozu once described himself as “like a painter who always paints the same rose.”
This is the late Ozu celebrated in retrospectives, but even in this period the poignancy is counterbalanced by bracing humor. His one flat-out comedy, Good Morning (1959), mounts a wry defense of the chitchat that lubricates daily life, while also becoming cinema’s first in-depth study of farting. Elsewhere drama is enriched by tints of comic observation. In The Flavor of Green Tea over Rice (1952), wealthy women staying at a spa discuss how pond carp resemble their husbands point for point. In Early Summer, the rebellious sons kick around a loaf of bread (“Don’t kick your food!” the father shouts), and later the adults snacking on cake hide their plates when one of the boys passes through the room. Social satire is never far from the surface, and even nansensu comedy will occasionally return. After a few drinks, An Autumn Afternoon’s two navy veterans speculate that if Japan had won the war, their teenagers would be in New York shaking their bottoms to rock ’n’ roll. “Good thing we lost,” they agree.
Ozu’s late films are built so thoroughly out of the textures of daily routine that it is easy to overlook how he recruits them into intricate formal patterns. Situations, gestures, lines of dialogue, color schemes, food on the table are all pulled into a teasing, almost bewildering pattern of symmetries. The intricacy of the plots—one woman wants to marry, another doesn’t, a third can’t decide or won’t say—finds a fine-grained equivalent in the glasses of beer and orange soda that scurry across the foregrounds, or the red teakettle that squats in a different position whenever we return to a certain alcove. This universe of parallels becomes a parallel universe.
Throughout his career Ozu carried the Shochiku policy to an artistic height, elevating the smiles-and-tears formula and rethinking Americanized découpage. His cinematic precision sustains the poignancy, forming a baseline against which the slightest emotion stands out in relief. Form also becomes the vessel of feeling, as when subtle shifts in composition or color mark a change in the drama. Yet Ozu still sees the funny side of everything, including his own style. When a can of nuts (“Walnut Circus”) skips around the frame in a string of shots or when the drinks in glasses dotted through an image are filled to exactly the same horizon line, we have found a filmmaker who believes that form, operating at all levels and taken to a playfully pure extreme, can yield deeply satisfying delights.
David Bordwell is Jacques Ledoux Professor of Film Studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison
