MUBI

This movie was quite a strange experience for me. It almost felt like someone had tampered with an Ozu film and inserted some montages and contrasting background score to mess it up. If this was Ozu’s attempt at black comedy then it was terrible one in my opinion. Furthermore, the movie lacked focus due to which the viewer is left confused regarding the subject matter of this movie. The movie dwells on a character (Hara’s father)which the viewer would have never expected to be shown in so much detail. Setsuko Hara on the other hand is missing after the first two scenes and we are wondering where she has gone until she makes short appearances till the end of the movie. We are so used to watching Hara in important roles that this unnatural cameo comes as a shock to us especially since the film begins with her.

The most impressive part of the film is Ozu’s characteristic humour that he uses very effectively until he decides to give us a tight slap at the end and leave us wondering whether we really deserved it. The curtains come down on the movie with an eerie background score and you are left wondering what exactly Ozu wishes to convey to us by doing that since the visuals are telling a totally different story.

Ozu has tried to surprise us is this movie which unfortunately feels like an experiment that went terribly wrong.

La petite musique d’Ozu – 08/03/2009

Ozu nous sert là encore un film raffiné, comme on s’y attache, qui nous parle d’un Japon disparu et des rapports familiaux inter-générationnels, de ce temps où les parents mariaient leurs enfants. Tout est toujours aussi sublime (plan, musique, scénario), si ce n’est que quelques répétitions ralentissent le propos, par rapport à d’autres de ses films encore plus réussis.

Compared to works such as Tokyo Story and Early Summer, this is a much more light-hearted offering from Ozu. His usual themes of generational differences, parent-child relations, and parent-child expectations are all present here but in a more comedic fashion. I wouldn’t recommend this to someone first experiencing Ozu (for that, I would suggest Tokyo Story and Floating Weeds) but for anyone who has become a fan of his movies – and his style for that matter – will do no wrong in checking this one out.

weak Ozu, Spoilers ahead:

(1961) End of Summer
Thanks to Criterion and their Eclipse line box set appropriately entitled “Late Ozu”, I have now seen all of Ozu’s ‘talkies’, “Early Spring” and “End of Summer” being the rarest to find with english subtitles.

End of Summer fails as a picture. It begins in a bar with one man waiting to be introduced to his friend’s sister. This is all unbeknownst to her, and as she is quite embarrassed, Akiko(played by Setsuko hara) finds a way to slide out the side door. We do not return to this strand for another 45 minutes, and even then it is brief, and later we return to it once again and nothing is really resolved either way. For the longest I was wondering what any of this had to do with the main story line, only to find out that Akiko and her brother were the children of the main character of the film, who along with his other children operate a sake brewery. But Akiko and her brother never really factor into anything else that the family does, aside from attending their father’s funeral, and nobody other than her close brother care if she remarries or not. So there is really no point in that whole plot strand being in the film, or even having any of those three characters, for that matter. The film would have worked just the same(not very well), without them. The main plot strand, revolves around an old man who tries to rekindle an old flame, while the woman doesn’t love him at all, but her and her daughter don’t mind recieving gifts from him. Nothing is really accomplished in this film, other than showing how greedy this woman and her daughter are, and how small businesses are vulnerable to big coorperations. There is no impact in this film, and the greatest moment in the film is when Chisu Ryo makes a cameo as a random farmer, who is washing vegetables with his wife in the river as they comment on the cycle of life, as the crematorium in the distance cremates a stranger who could be anyone, but happened to be the patriarch of the Kohayagawa family.

This is a weak film, lesser Ozu. 2 out of 5 stars, maybe.