The wealthy Toda family gather in the ancestral home to celebrate the matriarch’s birthday. However, their outward harmony is shattered by the sudden death of the patriarch. He has in left a legacy of debts. This leaves Mrs Toda and youngest daughter Setsuko homeless, penniless, and at the mercy of the inhospitable married children. Tired of being shunted around, they move into their dilapidated seaside villa. When youngest son Shojiro returns from Tianjin, he reapproaches his siblings at their fathers memorial service. He offers to take Mrs Toda and Setsuko with him to China, and agrees to Setsuko’s advice to marry her humble friend Tokiko. —Ozu-san.com
Yasujiro Ozu was born in the old Fukagawa district of Tokyo, to a fertilizer merchant, in 1903. In 1923, after a couple of years as an assistant teacher in rural Japan, Ozu was hired as assistant cameraman at the Shochiku Motion Picture Company. Early in his career, Ozu began to experiment with an idiosyncratic film style that ran contrary to the conventions of Japanese or Hollywood cinema of the day. He strove to reduce and simplify his film style; he cast such mainstays as the fade, the dissolve, and the pan from his cinematic palette. He shot solely from a low camera angle, using a 50mm lens, and he subordinated spatial continuity to visual aesthetics. Ozu directed his first film in 1927,The Sword of Penitence. In 1932, he began to hit his creative stride with the touching comedy I Was Born, But…, which was his first commercial success. During World War II, he made few films such as There Was a Father.
After the war, Ozu reached his creative peak and made some of his finest… read more
I gave this film my all my patience through its spirally storytelling and Japanese gloom and - thank all heavens - I came out more than rewarded. Ozu wrapped things up like only a genious would do so.
If the final few scenes of the film seem less than fully realized, there's a good reason behind it: according to Ozu, he was only given a few hours to wrap up the proceedings and he did the best he could with the time available to him. It's a minor flaw, but a flaw nonetheless, in what is otherwise a well-wrought, emotionally nuanced piece of work, an important one for Ozu as it turned out to be his first major box-office success in Japan while serving as a precursor of sorts to a number of his later films, including, and especially, Tokyo Story. Takamine Mieko (no relation to Hideko), whose state of mind Ozu maps in this film by often capturing her through a door as she faces another, gives one of her finest performances.
Knowing he is such a big fan of Ozu ... I swear Assayas' Summer Hours had inspiration drawn from this film ... overall one of my favorite of Ozu's work, and in my opinion one of his best written that I have seen.
