The director’s own biography lends itself all too well to Freudian analysis: A heavy smoker and drinker throughout his life, he never married, and lived with his mother until her death-just six or so months before his own, on his 60th birthday. (Put another way-also by Brody-“Characters’ inability to express their needs, desires, and wishes, because of tight traditions of decorum, give rise to much of the misery he depicts.”) Risks never ventured, conversations never started, and passions never indulged burn angry holes in Ozu’s deeply dignified domestic universe. “Ozu is often considered to be a director of sober restraint in fact, sober restraint is his main subject, and the subject of his critique,” The New Yorker’s Richard Brody has written, and it’s true. (Among men, the war between old and new could play out on a single body: In Late Spring, a middle-aged father played by Chishū Ryū-one of a bevy of actors employed by Ozu over and over-becomes the reluctant modernization of postwar Japanese culture personified, seen removing the suit, tie, and suspenders that he’s worn to work, and slipping into a kimono.)Ĭhieko Higashiyama and Setsuko Hara in Tokyo Story (1953). In Ozu’s films from the ’50s, the Western dress code embraced by younger female characters (swishy shifts, collared shirts, pleated skirts) chafes against his stark, colorless lens-a device that’s much better suited to framing their mothers’ fastidiously modest kimonos. (Quite unlike Kurosawa, Ozu eschewed the spectacular, sword-slinging violence of period films, or jidaigeki.) That focus informed one of his most affectingly articulated themes: intergenerational conflict, in many cases between a parent and his or her unmarried daughter. Narratively, his storytelling fell within the gendai-geki genre of film, television, and theater, mining contemporary Japanese life for its subject matter.
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