Thoughts on Ozu's Tokyo Story

I've seen this film several times. The first time I had trouble getting through it. I don't think I understood the depth of the story. It is a simple visual style that brings you in to the small World of the elderly couple visiting Tokyo. It is too bad that their children are all to busy to show them around Tokyo. Then story delves into themes that Ozu deals with in many of his films. Ancestor worship, the conflict between a modernizing Japan and it's agrarian past. Clearly the parents are from a rural area that is undergoing the process of industrialization. There are a number of scenes that show the factories humming along, billowing smoke, and of course the train runs through the middle of the village. It is these changes that the elderly couple and all of Japan confront in this story. Further into the story the subject of the War is touched on, but not too deeply explored.

At first I thought the first daughter who operates the beauty salon was evil. She comes off as very selfish and mean. Then, after her father gets drunk, and it is revealed that he has a past history of alcohol abuse, I changed somewhat my opinion. Perhaps the father was a drunk who neglected or even abused his children. The death of the second son is not revealed in the film at all. The audience is left guessing about what happened to him. Did he die in the war? Some accident? We do not know. Yet the widowed daughter in-law seems to suffer the most. She can't remarry she is still beholden to her dead husband's family. By the end of the film and her dialogue to her former father in law I got the impression that she was suffering from depression. She felt wronged by her husband's death and now was alienated by modern Japanese society. Her life in Tokyo was unfulfilling. She seemed hopeless. The smile she wore on her face dissipated by the end of the film. She was left in tears. I really started to feel for her at the end of the film.

The simplicity of Ozu's mise en scene is well documented. His style is so unique. I was measuring where the center of a shot of Ozu's was. It put the character's center at around their waistline. I felt like I was always looking up to the characters onscreen. Sometimes I was in pure awe of the mise en scene. It was like looking at a painting. Especially the shots of the rooms. The camera was framed to include just the room. It didn't pan in to do a close-up. Yet it did do a reverse technique that had read about. Ozu would bring the camera around to the complete opposite side of the character while they were talking. This was somewhat disorienting, but it still worked.

Tokyo is on my bucket list of places to go to. I've read that it is a bustling megatropolis with fun and amuzement aplenty. I would very much like to the places I have only seen in films or art books. And of course I would get to somewhere that Ozu, Kurosawa, Mizoguchi, or other masters of Japanese cinema shot films, wrote films, and discussed films. It would be worth the trip.