Tokyo Story

A+

Directed by Yasujiro Ozu

Often cited as one of the best films of all time, Ozu's "Tokyo Story" is the director's masterpiece and stands as a towering, monumental achievement in the career of a filmmaker whose body of work was practically overflowing with superb films.

"Tokyo Story" opens with elderly couple Shukishi (Chisu Ryu) and Tomi (Chieko Higashimaya) leaving their small coastal town to visit their children in Tokyo. Upon their arrival they discover that their children have little time to entertain them. Shukishi and Tomi are subsequently pushed out of the way for most of their visit, kept at arms length while their daughter Shige (Haruko Shugimura) and her husband attempt to go about their normal lives despite the presence of her parents. Only Shukishi and Tomi's daughter in law, Noriko (Setsuko Hara) spends any significant time with them, taking them on a tour of Tokyo and entertaining Tomi in her small apartment one evening while Shukishi is out with an old friend. Upon Shukishi and Tomi's return to their hometown, Tomi falls ills and her children must now make the trip to visit her as her health quickly deteriorates.

Like all of Ozu's films, the deceptively simple plot of "Tokyo Story" quickly reveals itself as so miuch more, evolving into a fascinating and engrossing character study and societal critique. This is Ozu at the peak of his craft, reworking familiar themes to perfection and in so doing creating a dense and complex tapestry of human emotions that is compelling in its authenticity, at once unique to a specific time and place and yet undeniably universal. It is this universality that makes "Tokyo Story" such a monumental achievement. Despite the fact that "Tokyo Story" was made more than five decades ago and was concerned mostly with providing a clinical deconstruction of the societal tensions present in the modern Japanese family, it still connects to viewers in an intimate way, providing a cast of characters whose conflicts and disappointments almost all of us can connect with on some level. Ozu's characters are so expertly and deftly crafted that we have little difficulty sharing in the frustration Shukishi and Tomi feel as they find themselves being pushed out of their children's life or understanding Noriko's disappointment with her own life which has failed to materialize in the way she had hoped.

From a technical standpoint, this is probably as close to a flawless film as anyone will ever make. No frame is wasted, no gesture is uneccesary, no line of dialogue should have been removed or added. Everything fits perfectly and falls into the rythmic cadence that is unique to all of Ozu's best works.

Ozu regulars Chisu Ryu, Haruko Sugimura, and Setsuko Hara are all present here doing superb work and lending credence to Ozu's story in a way only actors of their caliber could. Hara's performance is especially noteworthy as Noriko, a character she returned to two other times in Ozu's work, in both "Late Spring" and "Early Summer." I would contend that Hara's Noriko is one of the cinema's most fascinating characters, the embodiment of a young women devoted to her family and tradition who nonetheless shoulders the burden of societal pressures to marry, have children, and move away from home and be happy doing so even if that is not necessarily what she wants. In "Tokyo Story" Noriko's disappointment with the world is brought to a timeless climax when her younger sister in law Kyoko, frustrated by the greediness of Shige, asks Noriko why children drift apart from their parents as they grow older. Noriko attempts to explain to Kyoko that this is simply how life works and that things are the way they are, whether we like it or not, to which Kyoko asks, as an adolescent might, "Isn't life disappointing?" Noriko simply smiles and responds "Yes, it is."

As Donald Richie has commented, Ozu is a master at delivering such moments of emotional weight where the mounting frustrations of his characters, repressed throughout the length of the film, finally bubble to the surface and are released, not in a torrent of emotion and tears but rather in a simple statement that betrays their true feelings. Ozu's expertise in revealing the emotional state of his characters can also be seen in Shukishi's comment to a neighbor who stops by to offer her condolescences on the death of his wife when he says: "Oh, she was a headstrong woman ... but if I knew things would come to this, I'd have been kinder to her." He then pauses, smiles, and says,"Living alone like this, the days will get very long." These two short sentences, delivered at the very end of the film, serve both as a mea culpa for Shukishi's sometimes callous behavior as a husband as well as a veritable outpuring of grief at the death of his wife and demonstrate the full extent of Ozu's abilities at delivering moments of subtle yet devastating emotional impact.