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FILM COMMENT
Sept/Oct 2003
THE POETICS OF RESISTANCE
Richard Combs considers the Ozu behind "our Ozu" on the occasion of the Japanese
director's centennial
above: tokyo story
Is Yasujiro Ozu unique among major filmmakers in that his name conjures up such a definable and clear-cut image of his work, while his filmic personality and stylistic history, through a 35-year career and some 53 films, slides away somewhere behind it? To spare the effort of looking for a comparable case, we can construct one: imagine that John Ford's films from The Informer through Stagecoach, The Grapes of Wrath, and My Darling Clementine, had largely dropped from the historical memory, had somehow been rendered redundant by his development from, say, The Searchers through The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance and Donovan's Reef to 7 Women.
Late Ozu is "our" Ozu (possibly infringed upon only by the 1932 comedy I Was Born, But . . .), the succession of family dramas with seasonal titles, from Late Spring in 1949 to An Autumn Afternoon in 1962, films in which plotlines are diffused through quotidian detail and the dramatic highlights are either elided or undramatically tidied away. These are films in which "nothing happens" but where matters of life and death, the weight of the past and the terror of the future, are dealt with, and anger, disappointment, despair, and resignation are also accommodated.
Not that earlier Ozu has exactly been consigned to oblivion. Commentators as diverse as Donald Richie and David Bordwell have kept the entire oeuvre in view (Bordwell's 1988 Ozu and the Poetics of Cinema is dauntingly comprehensive), and Noel Burch (in To the Distant Observer) provides a theoretical account that claims the late silent and early sound period as Ozu's most experimental and throws out "our" Ozu as a steady calcification. The remarkable imposition of the Ozu "image" beginning in 1949 depends on a narrow range of subject and theme, worked through a comparably narrow range of stylistic choices-choices made from the common pool of classical or mainstream movie techniques.
The image imposes itself so forcefully mainly because it doesn't seem to manifest any idiosyncratic "authorial" authority. Its means are selected from the prescribed methodologies, but it is then rendered unique by the unnaturally high degree of selectivity and the idiosyncratic combinations into which the choices fall. It's as if the narrowing process leads inevitably to some vanishing point of the individual artwork and cinema's industrial norms. In such vanishing is the perfection and preservation of this Ozu image.
To be sure, our Ozu will be put in perspective by the 34 films to be shown in the retrospective at this year's New York Film Festival, and in other programs set for this centennial year. But context apart, are there other ways of picturing Ozu that might in a sense break up the image, by revealing new lines of force, bringing a different dynamic into play?
One starting point might be a potent line of dialogue in Tokyo Story (53), toward the end of the Hirayamas' visit to their grown children in Tokyo. The problems of accommodating the elderly couple have finally led to their being split up, and while father Shukishi (Chishu Ryu) is out drinking with old buddies, mother Tomi (Chieko Higashiyama) is put up in the small apartment of her widowed daughter-in-law, Noriko (Setsuko Hara). The latter's husband, the Hirayamas' eldest son, Shoji, is missing, presumably killed in the war. His photograph is still prominently displayed, and as she is settling down for the night, Tomi sighs, "How nice to lie in my dead son's bed."
This could be taken as one of a number of premonitions that have begun to build up around Tomi, to be expressed by her (watching her grandson play earlier, she muses, "By the time you're a doctor, I wonder where I'll be?"), about the unsuspected illness that will put her in a terminal coma soon after she returns home. Or it could be that families will always keep their dead and missing close. "I'm forgetful, yet I remember things about Shoji," says Chieko Higashiyama, the same actress but as a different mother in a different film, Early Summer (51), talking about a different Shoji, also missing in the war. Father believes he must be dead, but mother continues to hope and listens to a radio program called "The Missing Persons Hour," a kind of doubling of his ghostliness.
And if Tomi in Tokyo Story can slip into her son's place, father Shukishi already stands more ambivalently, troublingly, behind it. "Did Shoji drink?", Tomi asks her daughter-in-law at one point during their reminiscences, and when told that he did, she sympathizes, "So you had the sort of trouble I did." Shukishi admits to his old friends, "I've always disgraced myself by drinking," before going out on a bender that will lead to the film's most comic scene. In the dead of night, Shukishi and a similarly incapacitated friend will be delivered by the police to the premises-home and hairdressing salon combined-of his discomfited daughter Shige (Haruko Sugimura), who has been most irritated throughout by the old folks' visit, and dropped into her hairdressing chairs to sleep it off.
The like-father-like-son comments might be an aside, if they didn't shade what is ostensibly the main concern of the film: the drifting apart of the generations, the disappointment of the parents both in what the children have achieved for themselves and what they're prepared to extend to their parents, the changes that time and modern life bring. What is suggested instead is that the drifting apart is illusory, that alongside ties of guilt and responsibility there will always be a slip-sliding between characters, a substituting and making up, in whole or part, because loss, incompleteness, and insubstantiality are also part of the passage of time. In the bar scene where Shukishi gets drunk with his two friends, it's an almost de rigueur Ozu moment that one of the men will declare, as the evening goes on, that the bar girl more and more resembles his departed wife. It's an effect that also overtakes the mild but quite steady drinker Shuhei Hirayama (Ryu) when he's introduced to Tory's bar in An Autumn Afternoon. He even takes his elder son, Koichi, along to confirm the resemblance, but the latter can't see it. This might explain the remarkable predominance of widowers in Ozu's later films, which doesn't have to do with the life expectancies of men and women in Japan but with the need to set these men adrift to find substitutes (or imagined substitutes) for their missing loved ones-though it's a ribald joke in An Autumn Afternoon that one of the three friends simply finds it in a younger wife.
But the fulcrum of this in Tokyo Story is not any of the blood relatives of the Hirayama family-with their ambivalent, guilty, recriminatory ties that bind-but the partial outsider Noriko. She is identified with Shoji but is now necessarily adrift from him ("Often I don't think of him for days"); she is more considerate and obliging toward her in-laws than their own children are, but can confess, "I'm quite a selfish person, actually." Their pleas that she should remarry seem to fall on deaf ears: "My heart seems to be waiting. . . . Sometimes I feel I can't go on like this forever." Which picks up on the dark hint she leaves when Tomi warns her that she'll feel lonely as she grows older: "I'll never be that old, don't worry."
