Perfection perfection perfection! This is the penultimate film by the one filmmaker that somehow always continues to amaze me and reassert the power cinema has. It's like reading a haiku by Bashô, or a poem by Merwin. Something made in a different time and place, yet still so strongly present in the here and now.
Regardless of the pervasive and thoroughly Ozuesque marriage dealings, this film is really about death. Its imminence, immutability. Its invisibility. The comedy, of which there's plenty, is balanced and ultimately cancelled out by what unfolds, and the final funeral procession is worthy of Welles' "Othello" (1952) in its bleak finality, and that smoke from the crematorium is among the darkest and most beautiful metaphors in all of Ozu — our life vanishes with our body either into the ground, or as is appropriate in the Japanese culture, into thin air. It vanishes. For a moment a kind of an emblem of it lingers in the air, and then even that token is gone.
And as only Ozu can, there's always the comic undersong, no matter how dark the waters we're treading. (This works both ways, mind!) The past is on its way out, the present is colliding with the future. It's the old paterfamilias who's growing into a child again, rekindling an old flame, failing to act his age at the gate of death, and it's the daughter who tells him off (the brother all tight-lipped and spooked about mentioning it, failing to step up. As is often the case, the females are perfectly capable of coping not their own, thank you very much.
I think Ozu's impact is the strongest when I'm away from him for a while. Then I get used to other ways of seeing things, yet when I go back to him the effect is stupendous: how he frames a shot of a doorway, a train station, of what seems to be the most "insignificant" transitory shot between scenes is beyond words. But it's always in that which many of us find "insignificant" where he finds a whole new universe waiting to be explored, and cherished. The beauty of his cinema is why I love film. It's the great friendship that lasts.
Seeing as the BFI are either incapable or unwilling to complete their Ozu project and might not actually have the rights to this film anyway, and now that Criterion have pushed from the mainline into the Eclipse, I wonder when we might see a decent Blu-ray of this wonderful film.
Regardless of the pervasive and thoroughly Ozuesque marriage dealings, this film is really about death. Its imminence, immutability. Its invisibility. The comedy, of which there's plenty, is balanced and ultimately cancelled out by what unfolds, and the final funeral procession is worthy of Welles' "Othello" (1952) in its bleak finality, and that smoke from the crematorium is among the darkest and most beautiful metaphors in all of Ozu — our life vanishes with our body either into the ground, or as is appropriate in the Japanese culture, into thin air. It vanishes. For a moment a kind of an emblem of it lingers in the air, and then even that token is gone.
And as only Ozu can, there's always the comic undersong, no matter how dark the waters we're treading. (This works both ways, mind!) The past is on its way out, the present is colliding with the future. It's the old paterfamilias who's growing into a child again, rekindling an old flame, failing to act his age at the gate of death, and it's the daughter who tells him off (the brother all tight-lipped and spooked about mentioning it, failing to step up. As is often the case, the females are perfectly capable of coping not their own, thank you very much.
I think Ozu's impact is the strongest when I'm away from him for a while. Then I get used to other ways of seeing things, yet when I go back to him the effect is stupendous: how he frames a shot of a doorway, a train station, of what seems to be the most "insignificant" transitory shot between scenes is beyond words. But it's always in that which many of us find "insignificant" where he finds a whole new universe waiting to be explored, and cherished. The beauty of his cinema is why I love film. It's the great friendship that lasts.
Seeing as the BFI are either incapable or unwilling to complete their Ozu project and might not actually have the rights to this film anyway, and now that Criterion have pushed from the mainline into the Eclipse, I wonder when we might see a decent Blu-ray of this wonderful film.