After working and sacrificing her entire adult life to send her precious child to Tokyo for advanced schooling, a poor mother joins her now grown son for a week to see how he turned out, in a film by the great Yasujiro Ozu that dashes the perceptions of what a mother/son relationship, and it’s expectations, should be about.

That it’s not ultimately about success, which in 1936 Japan was hard to come by, is one of the film’s great messages, but the son, now married with a baby and a low paying teaching position, is embarrassed by what he’s made of his life, and the mother, shy and contemplative after years of suffering alone in a country factory town, has a hard time finding the words to encourage her struggling son.

Ozu, using sound for the first time, complements the plot, which is centered around a handful of conversations and outings between the mother and son, with his usual lovely, static compositions and pillow shots (those clotheslines get me every time), prompting us to contemplate the emotions and meanings of the conversations, and if expectations and disappointment need to be reevaluated, in the middle of a crippling depression.

Criterion’s much welcomed release includes work by famed Japanese film experts Tony Rayns, Tadao Sato, David Bordwell, and Kristen Thompson, but a Donald Ritchie commentary track would have been icing on the cake, and it’s conspicuously missing.