Yasujiro Ozu – 1950 – Japan
Wim Wenders called Ozu’s films a “sacred treasure of the cinema,” and it’s hard to disagree while watching any Ozu film. I consider him one of the two or three greatest directors ever, and this was the last obtainable film of his I’ve been able to... obtain; (Paul Ford anyone?). Though unmarried and childless for all of his 60 years, Ozu was preoccupied with familial conflict in his films, and this one is no exception; it’s one of his darkest and most intense stories about lapsed comprehension between generations, between spouses, and between siblings. A precocious teenager, Mariko (Hideko Takamine), full of modern ideas and contemptuous of those she accuses of “old-fashioned” thinking, undertakes a match-making mission between her long-suffering older sister and the man she passed over for marriage years before, which naturally necessitates a divorce from her boorish, drinking loaf of a current husband. As in all of Ozu’s later films (i.e. 1949-1962), the threatened disruption of manners and propriety is what gives the film its relentless suspense and sense of unease. Everyone is all smiles while forcing back the most wrenching emotions. All of this is beautifully mirrored, and fostered, of course, by Ozu’s famous minimalism, which by this point in his career had stripped his style of almost every filmmaking device except for the occasional tracking shot. There are no fades, dissolves, pans, zooms or any camera movement at all. Ozu is a master because he successfully fused form and content in a purely cinematic context, which, though it sounds simple, hasn’t really been done very often, in my opinion.
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