Tokyo story

Celebrated Japanese auteur Tasujiro Ozu was reportedly inspired by Leo McCarey's melodramatic Make Way For Tomorrow (1937) to create Tokyo Story in 1953. Seeing the older film for the first time was a compelling reason to watch the Japanese equivalent (also re-issued on DVD by Criterion).

Both are B&W, stagy and very dependent on the skills of the ensemble casts. They are totally different in style, story line and pace, of course. One is derived from Broadway, the other builds on the traditions of Kabuki and Noh theatre. The movies' themes are the same: ageing parents and generation gaps, family neglect and youthful selfishness. But where McCarey plumped for melodrama, Ozu presents subtler scenes. The major problem is his old-fashioned Japanese approach: he takes twice as long to tell his story.

Written with Kogo Noda (the co-writer for 13 out of Ozu's 15 post-War films), the movie watches a couple in their late 60s travel from a seaside town to Tokyo for the first time, to visit a son, daughter and the widow of their second son. He'd died in the Pacific War, and it's remarkable how the movie never refers nationalistically to the war and American occupation. I sensed a level of self-censorship; no character expresses any post-War bitterness. (There's even an odd, to Western eyes, product placement for Rinso washing powder.)

Much of the time in the first hour, the family members express little except standard Japanese conversational politenesses and male grunts. Plot developments occur off-screen and are referred to as past or future events. This is apparently an Ozu trait, as are the sudden cuts to details in stark townscapes (especially children walking, smokestacks and bare skies) with musical accompaniment. The most notice trait is constant usage of low-level camera positions.

This tatami-level cinematic viewpoint can be wearisome when it only shows doorways, corridors and women criss-crossing kitchens. In Western cinema, other than in Welles' truly ground-breaking sets, the device was usually a method for showing (and showing off to) audiences that a movie had been filmed in real locations with ceilings and natural lighting. In the Japanese context of households, designed for kneeling and squatting, the low-level angle does make sense. It also heightens the effect of close-up facial shots during reveries and conversations (when Ozu's characters are usually seen speaking direct to camera).

Roger Ebert commented memorably that in this movie Ozu had allowed his camera one tracking shot, which was much more than he usually did. The camera follows the old couple for a minute as they walk along an undifferentiated piece of pavement. They've decided to leave Tokyo, and it is a turning point in the scenario, but is it really so crucial that its audience needs to have significance emphasised?

The staginess in Ozu's plotting is clear from the frequent front-of-centre fixed camera position. Initially alienating, the formula captured my attention in the second hour, when the characters begin to draw back the curtains of their self-consciously two-dimensional lives. Scene by scene, one watches a cinematic version of an animated slide show.

The pace moves from a slow stroll to an almost sprightly amble while the mother dies and her family gathers again in their parents' home town. The widowed daughter-in-law and single younger daughter are the most dutiful and loving members of the younger generation, but the screenplay only hints at the obvious conclusion: children who marry inevitably make their own lives, create their own families, and will also end up alone.

Matter-of-factual and docu-dramatic, the film is rated by many critics to be Ozu's masterpiece and an all-time great. Not in my eyes and mind, which are not looking forward eagerly to watching other Ozus.