Tokyo Story
aka Tokyo Monogatari

Screening: 16 May, 6:30pm

Japan
1953

Director: Ozu Yasujiro
Production co: Shochiku
Producer: Yamamoto Takeshi
Screenplay: Ozu Yasujiro, Nodo Koga
Cinematography: Atsuta Yushun
Editor: Hamamura Yoshiyasu
Production designers: Hamada Tatsuo, Takahashi Toshio
Sound: Senoo Yoshisaburo
Music: Saito Taizo
Hirayama Shukichi: Ryu Chishu
Hirayama Tomi: Higashiyama Chieko
Noriko: Hara Setsuko
Kaneko Shige: Sugimura Haruko
Kurazo: Nakamura Nobuo
Hirayama Koichi: Yamamura So
Fumiko: Miyake Kuniko
Kyoko: Kagawa Kyoko
In Japanese with English subtitles
124 mins
B&W
16mm
G cert

Goodness, in a work of art, is almost always highly specialised, boring, or simply unconvincing. In how many films have you seen plain good people neither saints nor fools nor heroes effectively portrayed? You can see them now, in Tokyo Story, by the Japanese master Yasujiro Ozu

Perhaps the most beautiful and moving of [his] still, deep works, Tokyo Story is neither comedy nor tragedy; neither drama nor comedy-drama. Its movement, interspersed with flashes of humour, is from joviality to wistfulness, thence to profound melancholy, redeemed by final illumination. I can find no other category for it than Ozu, which is to say extraordinarily humane, affecting, and unique.

Tokyo Story deals with an elderly couple who leave their young schoolteacher daughter behind in the small town of Onomichi, while they go to visit their married children in Tokyo. One of the older children is a doctor, who turns out less successful and well-off than his parents had assumed. He and his rather colourless wife represent the ordinary person at his most neutral. A married daughter, a beautician, typifies the crass and stingy sides of ordinariness, still short of real badness. Then there is Noriko, widow of a son lost in the war, who, in contrast to the son and daughter and their spouses, does wonders of self-effacing generosity for the old folks. Like them, she is one of the truly good, without seeming idealised or dull.

The father's reactions to his wife's death are quietly heart-rending but the real heartbreaker is Noriko's affirmation that she herself will soon become self-centred. "Isn't life disappointing?" Kyoko blurts out without really raising her voice. Noriko smiles her sweeping, absolute smile and says, very softly, "Yes, it is." If you can sit through this unemphatic little scene dry-eyed, not only do you not know about art, you do not even know about life.

John Simon, Something to Declare: Twelve Years of Film from Abroad, New York, 1983

Internet Movie Database listing

Best film ever?