Ukigusa monogatari

This is one of the earliest Ozu films widely available, and the Criterion version is outstanding in quality.

Its a perfect example of Ozu at his best. Its a gem of a film - beautifully shot, a perfect structure, funny, sad and fascinating. The story is simple enough - a traveling troupe arrive at a town, not realizing the reason the chief actor picked the town is because an old flame of his lives here with his son. His current girlfriend in her jealousy tries to stir things up, but things don't turn out as either expect.

What is most striking about the film is just how modern it seems. The characters are believable and funny, the female characters are strong and willful, while even the minor characters are nicely sketched out. The acting is nothing short of brilliant, which makes the whole film very entertaining - this is no period piece of academic interest only, its a great work of art and a wonderful film - a masterpiece really.

This film is full of the sensitive observation, the slow-building tragic emotion and the moral ambiguity of Ozu's later works. While eschewing the cheap tragedy that was already so fashionable in Japanese melodrama (you can imagine the story going in that direction for any other director), the ending leaves the viewer uncertain and unsettled, with only the vaguest hopes for all concerned.

Apart from the depiction of a rundown and pathetic acting troupe (it reminds me of Alan Mowbray's drunken Shakespearian actor in 'My Darling Clementine'), and the rural small-town atmosphere, what lingers on in the mind is the portrait of an extremely flawed man. Like the great male characters of American cinema, Ichikawa is decent but ruled by anger, regret, and a certain way of life. will Ichikawa ever really be able to change, or do justice to those he feels responsible for? But after all, actors will be actors...

In fact, if this film is to be criticized for anything, it should be done so for its lack of a really detailed look into the lives and profession of the actors. After all, Ichikawa's profession turns out to play such an important part, in the end, in the fate of his 'family'.

Ozu's direction of women (particularly Ichikawa's wronged, but vengeful, lover) is sensitive and truthful, while his his direction of children is, as always, well-observed and hilarious.

People float, their stories, the roles they perform and worlds they bring to life, this is the main thrust of the film.

So I have been recently surveying early Ozu as part of two personal quests: the first of these is where I'm looking for images of some purity from the first hours of cinema. The film is fine in this regard, Ozu's most renowned silent film about a kabuki actor returning with his troupe to his hometown to confront a difficult past. There is concentrated mind, a clear gaze. Composed shots, especially outdoors. But hardly any noticeable difference from his previous films. Why this is held in comparatively higher esteem than say Dragnet Girl or Passing Fancy, I posit has a lot to do with a more overt Japaneseness.

Earlier Ozus were distinctly modern: I Was Born But.. about schoolkids growing up in a rapidly Westernized Japan, Dragnet Girl about a young boxer drawn to the excitement of gangster life. Tokyo Woman unraveled like what was called a 'kammerspiel' in Weimar Germany. There was no benshi narrating these, as was the traditional norm adopted from Japanese theater. They employed the Western fashion of intertitles. Western garb for the leading players. References to movies, music records, boxing, corporate or factory work.

But this one has some of that exotic appeal that first fascinated the rest of the world about Japan. The same thing as the Mizoguchi revival in the 50's. For some reason, Western viewers are a lot more receptive to Japanese films that validate idealized preconceptions.

Now my other quest where this fits into, is films that visually or otherwise exemplify the karmic resonances that move our worlds. What kindles our emotional fires. In the best of cases, this means a storytelling part governed by a set of abstract parameters that control how we tell that story. How the world is in turn colored and appears to us. At around this time, in the West this was primarily being developed as film noir.

The Japanese are some of the most reliable to turn to for this: cultural seclusion cultivating purity, plus many actual practices for doing so - from gardening to making tea. The effort is to embody the world as it comes into being, this is the level that Western art has rarely managed to attain. It's worth getting to know about these things, if only to shatter those preconceptions. A tea ceremony is not about pomp or quaint etiquette but meditation.

So here we have a man who has abandoned his child and run off to play roles on a stage. Turns out he has become known for what is grouped together in kabuki as bandit plays, folk legends about heroic scoundrels. (a famous example of these that you have the chance to see adopted to film and from this era, is Kochiyama Soshun by Sadao Yamanaka).

Presumably this is how he views himself, a man who is wrong by conventional standards but deep inside pure.

Now and then he returns home, again playing a role. This early misdeed returns to haunt him: his son is seduced by a woman from his troupe, another actor performing a role. He learns the truth and in turn seems ready to run off. The whole thing replicates itself, recycling the same floating story. Only forgiveness can sever the destructive karma that has been set in motion.

Again this is fine and the film worth watching. What it's missing however, I believe is an additional layer that resolved ordinary drama on stage, conflating performance of the inner story with the one we are watching as our film about it. Transitory but precious humanity, rendered visually as a play passing through town. A lot of room for improvisation, as real life shapes the thing.

Imbalance that reflects impermanence is the key. Instead we get balanced drama.

If you have time and the resources and as example of what I'm talking about, I recommend that you look for a silent French film called Eldorado from '21, where a female dancer sublimates motherly woes into seductive dance. It is more primitive in some ways, but in others not.

Early silent film from acclaimed Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu, "A Story of Floating Weeds" is an ostensibly simple tale of the head of an itinerant troupe of Kabuki players reconnecting with his teenage son Shinkichi (Koji Mitsui). The boy, who had been told that his father was a civil servant who had died, is a student 'with prospects' and the father does not want him to know of his humble origins. As he says to one of the female players in his troupe "My son belongs to a better world than yours", which of course, is the same world as his. Although the focus of the story is on the 'master' and his secret family, there are a number of entertaining scenes featuring the troupe as they are stuck in the town with their performances rained out, broke and bored, which much of the gentle humour coming at the expense of Tomi-boh (Tomio Aoki), the little boy with the errant bladder who plays a dog in the troupe's show. I watched an English-subtitled Criterion Edition on TCM and my only criticism is that the piano score seemed (IMO) too 'Western' for the setting (but I have no idea what the original music was like). The film is a slow-moving but poignant and beautifully filmed taste of pre-WW2 Japanese life. Later audiences would have found Shinkichi's mother's statement that he'll soon be old enough for the draft much more foreboding than Ozu could have intended. Remade by the same director as "Floating Weeds" in 1959.

"A Story of Floating Weeds" (1934) was the second Yasujiro Ozu's film I've seen. Like with "Tokyo Story", I kept asking myself, why the film that was made so many years ago about the people who lived so far away in the world I don't know much about is so wonderfully engaging? Why was I so drawn to the characters of this human drama? The story is simple: an aging, traveling actor who is the manager of a kabuki troupe returns to a remote village where he secretly meets his former lover and her 19 year old illegitimate son, to whom he is known as "uncle." The older man finds happiness in communicating with his son who turned to be a fine young man. His current mistress, filled with jealousy because of his attachment to his secret family, hires a young beautiful girl, the member of a troupe to seduce a boy.

Directed by the great director and humanist with elegant simplicity, genuine interest to his characters and restraint, this moving film is never melodramatic or manipulative.

I liked the music score written specially for the film in 2004. I tried to watch it silent but it would take me more than one viewing to get used to no music score at all.

Seems that Ozu valued the film and thought about it a lot - he himself made a remake in color and sound 25 years later.