Once Upon a Time in Tokyo: Tokyo Story (Dir Yasujirō Ozu, 2h16m, 1953)

In 1985, two decades after Yasujiro Ozu's death, the German film-maker Wim Wenders made a pilgrimage to Tokyo. The film he would make there, Tokyo-Ga, is as much a tribute to the city as the director. In Wenders' view, Tokyo and Ozu are intermeshed, such that he later narrates: "No other city, along with these people, has ever felt so familiar and so intimate to me long before I ever managed to go there, namely for the films of Ozu."

Cinema is a vehicle of transportation; as we will see over the final two reviews of this season, there is something exciting about placing ourselves in this far-off land of Japan, as ever-increasing numbers of Western action, adventure, and family films, do. Wenders himself fell for the spell of Tokyo to such a degree that his globe-trotting epic, Until the End of the World (1991) makes a stop in the city, whilst his most recent feature, Perfect Days, (2023) would represent Japan at the 2024 Oscars.

What of Ozu, though, who brought Wenders to a Tokyo of the silver screen? Yasujiro Ozu is, to the western viewer, overshadowed by Kurosawa: Ozu's films are described as slow-moving, urban, and success restricted to Japan itself, whilst Kurosawa's samurai films, his bold use of action, and-at least in some critics' eyes, a style that played more to Western tastes than Japanese-were colossally popular abroad. Yet, undeniably, one film stands out, one film has become perhaps the film Ozu is known for in the west, and-rightfully-acclaimed. It is a film that shows a family-and Tokyo, and indeed Japan at large-at a crossroads, between the past, and the traditional, and the future, and westernisation, depicted by two generations as elderly parents from the provinces visit their children in the capital. That film is Tokyo Story.

By 1953, Ozu had been working in Japanese cinema for over twenty-five years. While most of his black and white silent films are now lost, it outlines a film-maker that steadily, especially during the post-War sound era, depicted the lives of working, and middle class, Japanese, in a genre that would eventually become known as Shoshimin-eiga; together with Tokyo Story, the films Late Spring (1949) and Early Summer (1951) form a rough trilogy, all three of the films considering the growing conflict between generations, as Japan modernised, and typified visually by Ozu's static camera, cinematography by Yūharu Atsuta, whilst all three films star Setsuko Hara (who would play the elderly couple's daughter in law, Noriko, the widow of one of their sons) and Chishū Ryū, who would play the star role as the family patriarch.

Before the arrival of Shūkichi (Ryu) and Tomi Hirayama (Chieko Higashiyama), we are introduced to the location in which they will spend much of their time in Tokyo; here we get a perfect example, as we briefly discussed when considering Perfect Days, the sense of ma-the sense of space and stillness. It's famously noted that the camera moves twice in the entire two and a bit hours of Tokyo Story, perfectly balanced at the beginning and end of a scene in which the couple are alone in a Tokyo garden, but the rest of the film is told in these static shots, these explorations of space, and emptiness-though of course, none of these shots are truly empty. There is, however, a deliberateness to all of this, a refinement upon refinement upon refinement of Ozu's tried and tested style-the low camera, the lack of intercutting, the slightly off centre framing, the blocked off camerawork, the middle class characters played by the same cast, the ever-present collaborators, Kogo Noda, who would co-write almost every one of Ozu's post-War films, and the sparse score, composed by Takanobu Saitō. Each of Ozu's later films essentially exists as a refinement of this style, narrative and all.

These are not mere "paintings of time", as Tarkovsky shot his lengthy sequences, but meditations-the camera never takes up a point of view, a character's perspective, but peers in to scenes in which the human characters-Ozu's core troupe, his rotating cast, playing this role or that-feel like set dressing too. We see the upper floor of the house at rest, as one of the couple's daughters prepares it for their visit, but we also witness, via the presence of one of their children in turn, the sense of generational divide, of the drifting apart of each successive generation as the boy grumbles about losing his studyspace,only for his mother to retort he never studies anyway. When Shukichi and Tomi arrive, itt is as anticlimax. There is a melancholy to Tokyo Story, a sense of two generations losing touch with each other represented in this confined domestic interior. Their children are modern, westernised, and none of them seem to have time for their parents.

Thus, the couple are left to their own devices, their children busy at work and with their own lives, regarded, even by themselves as unable to cope with the bustling metropolis, yet disappointed that their children live so far from the capital's centre, and that their children have not made more of themselves. We only see Tokyo itself fleetingly, and shorn of landmarks-in one of a small number of external shots, outside those meticulously designed sets, thanks to their only real companion during their visit, Noriko, who, unlike the couple's children, makes an effort to spend time with her father and mother in law. Their children in turn chide each other for overspending on their provincial parents, a sense of the older generations being a burden, the group of them eventually paying for their parents to spend time at an onsen, a spa, only for the pace here to be too much for them, and for the elderly couple to decide to return home, where this sense of the younger generation having no time for the older, and their connection ever-fading, is repeated. Despite the film's unhurried pace, there is a sense of something fleeting, as the film's final third proves to be.

Things are, ultimately disappointing. The younger generation are unable to make time for their elderly relatives, feel they are being overly generous, and soon steal away into the edges of Ozu's frames once the event has passed, rushed off their feet by the rapid economic expansion of the country. The elderly couple, largely speaking in reverence of things past, are disappointed with this modernity, soon eager to leave the hustle and bustle of the capital they barely get to see, and only truly happy when left to their own devices, to picnic and gossip and drink with old friends. They are disappointed with the generation that has succeeded them, in their lack of ambition. Japan, it seems, as Ozu reduces an entire nation down to a single family, as his preceding post war films did with ever more exacting quality, is disappointed in what has become of it. There is something deeply mournful about this sense of resignation.

Whilst Kurosawa's Ikiru (1952) faces this fate with courage, a belief that things can and will be improved, even if it is to be a single park, Tokyo Story accepts what will come. A sense of Zen, perhaps, easy for a western audience to apply to any slow moving Japanese film, but overt here, permeates Tokyo Story. Tokyo-Ga, like Tokyo Story, ends not in the capital, but Onomichi, hundreds of miles away; Ozu seems to be saying: Tokyo has receded into the past, never to be visited by the old couple again. All things are fleeting, cinema doubly so. Yet, Tokyo Story is perhaps the quintessential film of the capital's people as they were at the turn of the 1950s, a moving, and deeply humane film about a family, their daily struggles to live, and the city they inhabit told in the unmistakable spare poetic style of one of Japanese cinema's greatest directors.

Rating: Must See (Personal Recommendation)

Tokyo Story is available on DVD and Bluray from Universal Pictures. It is available for streaming via the BFI Player.

Next week, we turn to Western views of the capital, in Sofia Coppola's romantic comedy of mismatched Americans alone together in Tokyo in Lost in Translation.