Japan film school
1959
color 119 min.
Director: Yasujiro Ozu
CLV: $44.95 - available
           1 disc, catalog # CC1183L
VHS: available from Home Vision Cinema
Subtle, lyrical, and
delicately bittersweet, Floating Weeds offers an excellent introduction to
the cinema of Yasujiro Ozu -- one of the greatest of all Japanese filmmakers, and
until recently in the West, one of the least known."The Japanese . . . think
of Ozu as the most Japanese of all their directors," wrote film scholar Donald
Richie of this master of lyric melodrama and low-key comedy whose career spanned
the silent era to the post-war period. And from every angle it's easy to see why.
For while the period dramas of his great filmmaking compatriots Akira Kurosawa
and Kenji Mizoguchi won acceptance in the West (as their stories sparked
comparisons with our Westerns and "women's pictures"), Ozu's work was seldom seen
outside Japan until some ten years after his death in 1963. His devotion to
detailing everyday Japanese life, and his refusal to jazz things up with fancy
camerawork and slick melodramatic formulas, made most distributors feel his work
was unexportable -- a quality that made the Japanese take Ozu to their hearts
more than ever.
But times, and tastes, change and today filmmakers as diverse
as Wim Wenders and Martin Scorsese rank Ozu as a master the equal of Chaplin and
Rossellini in the delicacy of his observations of people and their lives. And as
his large body of work becomes increasingly more available in the West, movie
lovers are rapidly coming to agree with them.
A remake of a story he first
told in a 1934 silent film, Floating Weeds (1959) stands a bit apart from
the bulk of Ozu's work, which primarily dealt with the middle-class mainstream.
But his favorite theme of the stresses and strains of parent-child relationships
figure prominently in this story of a raggle-taggle theater troupe giving its
final performances in a small fishing village.
Years before the action of the
film began, the troupe's leader Komajuro (Ganjiro Nakamura) fathered a son
(Hiroshi Kawaguchi) by a local woman (Haruko Sugimura). Periodically he visited
the boy, who was raised believing the actor to be his uncle. Now, with the
company on its last legs, and the boy about to enter manhood, old Komajuro is
anxious to make up for lost time, and become the father he never was to his
child. But when his mistress (Michiko Kyo) finds out about the situation, she
becomes overwhelmed by jealousy.
She bribes one of the younger girls in the
troupe (Ayako Wakao) to make a pass at the boy, breaking his heart and bringing
disgrace upon him, as actresses are considered socially unsavory -- even by
Komajuro himself. But her plotting goes awry when the young people actually fall
in love. And Komajuro's plans are also thwarted when the boy defies him --
insisting on marrying this "unsuitable" girl. Everything comes out for the best
for all concerned in the end, but not before each of the characters faces the
fact that life involves both compromise and sentimental regret.
Given this
scenario, most filmmakers would chart it out as a simple series of melodramatic
"highs" and "lows." Not Ozu. From the first shot, comically juxtaposing a
lighthouse (background) with a sake bottle (foreground), to the last one of a
train swiftly moving over a nighttime landscape, it's plain we're in the hands of
a filmmaker whose prime concern is understatement and overtone. Rather than rush
to the heat of a "big" dramatic moment, Ozu concentrates on the warmth of "small"
ones. In scene after scene the way the characters walk, sit, stand, and speak is
scrupulously observed. Time and time again, he gives the screen over to "minor"
characters (the secondary actors in the troupe, always on the prowl for women)
and even "unimportant" ones (passers-by, old people, children).
Nothing is
"unimportant" in Ozu's view. The story is not meant to stand as an "exceptional"
dramatic incident, but rather as part of the context of the ebb and flow of life.
"Unimportant" people and actions are part of this ebb and flow. In fact, so are
the places and inanimate objects surrounding them. And so we are treated to
lovingly photographed shots of banners blowing in the wind, gardens dripping with
rain, empty small town streets. They punctuate the action, signaling the
beginnings and ends of scenes. But they are also there to be seen for themselves
in a manner that can only be called poetic.
As critic James Stoller has said,
"If, to arrive at poetry in our time, we must sometimes go a long way, Ozu took
us the longest way of all: back into the arms of a world we thought we had
abandoned." This abandoned world is nothing less than the one we inhabited as
children -- when each sight and sound was seen and appreciated by us as new. Ozu
in Floating Weeds tells us a story, but at the same time he brings it to
us through a child's eyes. We cannot ask more of a film artist.
-- DAVID
EHRENSTEIN
Credits
Director: Yasujiro Ozu
Producer: Masaichi
Nagata
Screenplay: Kogo Noda, Yasujiro Ozu
Photography: Kazuo
Miyagawa
Art Direction: Tomowo Shimogawara
Music: Takanobu Saito
Color
Consultant: Shozo Tanaka
Lighting: Sachio Itoh
Editor: Toyo
Suzuki
Transfer
This edition of Floating Weeds was
transferred from a 35mm master print.