Idle Criterion Film Club Week 3: Tokyo Story (1953)

[Roderick]

Phew, this is a Japanese classic alright! I've started watching it, but due to overall business haven't finished it yet. I'll wrap it up soon and post my findings here.

 

I will sketch the context already: I've been a fan of Japanese cinema and storytelling for quite some years now, and have over the years digested quite a breadth of works. From the obvious anime to classic films (Kurosawa, obv), from schlocky yet glorious samurai epics (Sword of Doom springs to mind, any number of Musashi flicks) to sprawling costume drama's by the NHK. Quite a lot of modern films too. And somehow Tokyo Monogatari always eluded me. It's one of the most well-regarded films inside and out of Japan, so it has quite the name to live up to.

 

Tangent: at this point I've seen a rather handsome amount of films from the 50s, and few from before that. I get the feeling that film as a medium really reached maturity in that era. I don't want to make all too sweeping a statement (the likes of La Règle du Jeu show clearly how sophisticated films from 1939 and before can be), but there's a general sense that the fifties were the times when everyone caught up and tons of classics got made. Then the sixties appeared and with that color film and true modernity (James Bond) - but there's something about films from the 50s that was already apparent in Kanal: both highly modern yet classical. I've come to love the decade for its cinema.

 

Right, I might be totally wrong about all of this, but onto Ozu's masterpiece it is!

[prettyunsmart]

One thing that I've been really interested in with each Ozu film I've seen (particularly with Tokyo Story and I Was Born But...) is how moral/moralizing of a filmmaker he is. In most understandings of cultural distinction, moralizing and didacticism are generally markers of "low culture" that "true artists" should avoid at all costs. Yet, Ozu's films are so often deeply concerned with domestic issues, particularly with children's inattention to or lack of understanding of their parents, but his place in the canon of world art cinema is hardly ever questioned...not that I think it should be. Is it his technical mastery that makes critics who would otherwise scorn his subject-matter, or is there something else that sets his work apart?

 

Sort of like the discussion of melodrama in The Earrings of Madame de..., I'm always interested when "low culture" elements come up in the discussion of art objects we normally associate with "high culture," and I usually am left thinking about how unstable our categories of aesthetic valuation are.

 

Well, that was excessively pretentious. Sorry about that. 

[feelthedarkness]

Boy, I love this movie. One of the things that makes the "moralizing" work is that it's not at all heavy handed. I feel like being the age I am, I saw these scenes with a sense of "ohh, they're going to regret this." 

[Roderick]

Took a while, but I finally saw the whole thing. Here are my initial thoughts, before I engage yours above:

 

 

So, no one here is having fun. I mean it, no single character in Tokyo Story allows themselves the luxury of enjoying life. Instead, it's all just a gruelling slog, a joyless going-through-the-motions. It's like they're all quaking under some terrible feeling of guilt (possibly stemming from the war?).

 

And so you get this film, where the concept of enjoying life is an alien thing. It starts with an elderly couple who travel to Tokyo to visit their children – not because they'd like to, but because this might be the last chance they get before they're too old. For the children it's all a big burden. They're busy with their lives and their work, but of course publicly they have to express how much they would've liked to take their parents to the kabuki theater.

 

The bothersome thing is, I don't think any of these people are cold, callous or insidious. They just seem incapable of enjoying themselves. Some of them retreat in their work and snide remarks, others, like the elders, hide behind a wall of politeness. Hooo boy, grandpa and grandma. At first they seem so kind and loving, but their dysfunction shows later on. Can't sleep because of a loud party? Let's not mention it ever. Concerned for the well-being of your daughter-in-law? Keep on smiling, do not stop smiling as you address this in the weakest way possible. They never show their true feelings to anyone, not even to the other. Underneath their politeness they share the same amount of disappointment and anxiety as their offspring. Needless to say, everyone knows what everyone else thinks and feels, but no one says anything and the theater can continue. This is Japanese society at its most infuriating.

 

Ozu depicts this in the boringest way possible. That's not a complaint: the events of the movie and its characters are actually quite compelling, but he frames everything as tedious and uneventful as he can. Whenever something actually happens in the story, be it an illness, a death in the family or the trip home, he sets it up and then skips over it. We're left with the fallout. We learn things through a telegram or have to infer that something did or didn't happen through dialogue. Everything is in the service of making the viewer feel that these people are trapped in a social vice of their own creation, that all life and adventure has been sucked out of their world.

 

That makes Tokyo Story dramatically uncompelling and I had to watch it in three sittings. I almost fell asleep during one. At every turn, Ozu ensures that the stakes are low, that we understand that no one is the bad guy, no one is actually in danger and no one certainly is going to cause a scene. Everything stays hidden under the poisonous fake friendliness of Japanese life in the fifties, right up to the final moment. Grandpa is sitting in his house, alone, pondering over the death of his wife. A cheerful neighbor drops by and peeks in through the window. After a small exchange of pleasantries, she concludes, smiling, “You're going to be lonely,” and leaves him immediately.

 

 

I don't know if Ozu sought to accuse Japanese society of this behavior, or how moralistic it is. The final picture of the lonely parent certainly seems to point a finger at the children, but I don't see it quite as their exclusive failing. Like I explained above, this entire family is not communicating - how can you expect engagement from any of them towards the other? This is as much a failing of the parents as it is of the children.

 

The one thing this film didn't do was grab me emotionally. It was too... outlandish for that. I just have a hard time identifying with people who won't communicate when it would remedy so much, be it through societal pressures or their own family dynamic. That made it more of an abstract piece for me to observe rather than an emotional journey.

[prettyunsmart]

Boy, I love this movie. One of the things that makes the "moralizing" work is that it's not at all heavy handed. I feel like being the age I am, I saw these scenes with a sense of "ohh, they're going to regret this." 

 

I'd definitely agree that there's a greater degree of complexity in the film than my first comment would suggest. The main reason I bring it up is that each time I watch the film, my first thought is "it's been too long since I've called my parents."

 

Then again, like Roderick suggests, there is a more general sense of false contentment and emotional disconnection going on in the film that makes everything more complicated than just "kids, be nice to your parents." 

By the way, Roderick, sorry if I was out of line in posting my comment before you got to write up your full post. I've just been bad at keeping up with the film club so far, so I wanted to post while the thought was on my mind.

[Roderick]

Not a problem at all, feel free to post whenever whatever!

[ariskany_evan]

I am almost done with Tokyo Story.  Had tried to watch it years ago but fell asleep.  During my first viewing recently I stopped to take a nap.  Definitely soporific.  Have installed the Hulu+ app on my phone for viewing right before bed, as I'm having trouble finding time to fit in the movie otherwise.  Kind of love that it's probably the worst way to watch these revered films.

 

I'll post again once I'm finished, just wanted to bump the tread to remind people to watch!

[Roderick]

Thanks! And it's also almost time to announce the next film, but I hope there'll be some more discussion about Tokyo Story here. I knew it'd be a tough one, but put some goddamn splints in your eyesockets and reach that fade to black everyone!

[Professor Video Games]

Ok I finally had some time to watch this one so here are some rambling thoughts. I liked it more than my previous viewing many years ago, which I credit to being older, though it's still a bit of a slog at times. It's 99% static shots, which goes pretty far at keeping the movie's energy level to a minimum. Obviously that's deliberate, but it can make watching a challenge sometimes. I think the only two tracking shots are when the grandparents are essentially kicked out and they're eating lunch alone in the park. There was also a lot of talking directly at the camera, which I didn't really get. Was it supposed to be like they were addressing the audience? Mostly I found it distracting.

 

Roderick, I think you're being a little too hard on the grandparents. I thought they were pretty open with one another. For example, they had discussions about their disappointment with their children and their frustrations with the hotel experience. Seemed more like it was just with everyone else that they did all the smiling and nodding, like upon returning from the hotel or that last scene where the grandfather and neighbor happily discuss how insanely lonely he's about to be. Yes, that certainly is nice...being alone and having children who wished you had died first.

 

But I wouldn't say the movie was so much moralizing as simply observing how easy it is to get wrapped up in ones own life and to ignore things that have become so familiar...the movie doesn't portray the kids as bad people, just oblivious. At the funeral the one daughter mentions how great a time the parents had in Tokyo and how nice it was to have them there. Like she's completely forgotten the fact that she spent most of her time handing them off to others or sending them off alone, even if she meant well when she did those things. They're just too wrapped up in their own mundane lives to realize they're being jerks and the parents are too polite to speak up. Not that being so oblivious is ok...they're still jerks. Maybe the lack of familiarity is why the only real open exchanges are between the grandparents and the widowed daughter-in-law...people that aren't even really related and so in some way, are more considerate of each other.

 

Oh and maybe this was a translation issue, but at one point the grandmother has a line that's something like "I sure am excited to sleep in my dead son's bed." Uh...what?

[Roderick]

Oh wow, I didn't catch that line, I used the Dutch subtitles. To be sure, the mother does sleep in the house of her deceased son, so maybe she did say it, or in a way that makes it seem less psycho?

 

You're right that the grandparents aren't totally bad, but I still find it infuriating how much they position themselves as victims. A lot of this is on themselves, and of course we don't know how the kids were raised and what's at stake here. I get the feeling that all we can do is make these judgment calls (whether that's the intention of the movie or not) based on assumptions. Who the hell knows what went on in the lives of these people? It's so easy to forget the context: underneath all the modernity on display this is a traumatized country coming from extreme devastation only eight year ago. We see Tokyo as a bustling city, but eight years earlier it was firebombed to oblivion.

 

Maybe it isn't so strange that these people are all fake smiles after all. Escaping into false pleasantries and work might be all that's keeping them together.

[ariskany_evan]

Totally agree about our ambivalence towards the parents treatment of the grandparents.  We at least know that the elder children had to deal with father's alcoholism.  Shige's tantrum when he comes home blind drunk has a child-like whining to it, which I think shows that there are a lot of unresolved issues from earlier in their lives.

 

Noriko's conversation with Kyoko at the end is killer.  "Isn't life disappointing?" "Yes, it is."  Smiling away.  The smiling in this movie!  Oof.  So pointed, so veiled.

 

I had thought that the shots where they looked at the camera were supposed to be dialog shots (shot, reverse shot).  Agree that they were oddly framed and lit.  Really put you in the middle of their dialog so you could feel the awkwardness.

 

Agree about the static shots, too.  And considering that what happens in the frame usually just involves two people sitting around exchanging pleasantries.  Almost all interiors.  Quiet, static, flat.

 

The cadence of Japanese speech is so different from English that I worry I was a bit detached from the nuances of how they were communicating.  Hard to tell how much of the formalities were true and natural to the culture in the '50s and if any were played up to show the emotional barriers between the family.

 

One of those movies that I find beautiful in thought, but the experience of it was hard (boring and depressing, mostly).  It stands in my memory as a real, true thing, as if it were a lived moment.  Loved it!!

[Professor Video Games]

Yeah the undercurrents of the war are pretty interesting. There's these tangential conversations about sons being lost in the war (which kinda leads to the old guys getting drunk) or the comment that their hometown was spared bombing. I'd say everyone's still a bit shellshocked...maybe that's why the adults are so eager to get back to their day to day routines. They need that normalcy.

[ariskany_evan]

Yeah the undercurrents of the war are pretty interesting. There's these tangential conversations about sons being lost in the war (which kinda leads to the old guys getting drunk) or the comment that their hometown was spared bombing. I'd say everyone's still a bit shellshocked...maybe that's why the adults are so eager to get back to their day to day routines. They need that normalcy.

 

That was probably a factor with financing films so soon after the war.  I would doubt that the Japanese public would be psyched to see something that reminded them more directly.

 

Noriko's convo with Kyoko at the end may have been her wrestling with the idea of "letting go" of Shoji.  She seemed like a liminal character, the only one who wasn't set in her ways.  Haunted by her dead husband, living in poverty (I'm guessing maybe subsidized by the government?), yet she showed the greatest generosity and emotional honesty (though does maybe the MOST fake smiling of anyone in the film).

 

So she comes to see the callousness of the siblings as a necessary hardening.  She suddenly sees her life as having been on hold while she wrestled to honor the memory of her husband.  Which could draw a parallel though to the Japanese people's necessary hardening and forced return to normalcy after the war.

 

Kyoko not understanding makes sense because she would have been a child during the war.  The collective devastation that the Japanese felt after the war was already lost on a younger generation just 8 years after.  But Ozu shows that regular, everyday personal loss has a similar effect.   Noriko realizing that hardening, that turning away from was the best thing she could do for herself at the end of the film.  And trying to explain that to Kyoko is impossible.  You have to experience the loss to understand.  Which makes Tokyo Story's withholding of movement, of action so much more powerful!  Ozu doesn't wring out every last moment of the mother's death.  You either get it or you don't.

 

(sorry that's a bit jumbled.  I was figuring it out as I was writing...)

[elmuerte]

Damn this movie is racist... all those stereotypical things about the Japanese.

 

Just kidding. I did not pay much attention to the story. I was just looking at Japanese life in motion (so to say), that was quite interesting to witness.

[Professor Video Games]

Every mother's dream!