On Screen
SIMON, JOHN
On Screen THE DIGNITY OF ORDINARY LIFE BY JOHN SIMON Y m asujiro Ozu. best known for Tokyo Story, is the most haunting filmmaker I know. With almost unnoticeable pinpricks, he insinuates himself...
...Everything in his films is profoundly telling, yet remains only a detail...
...We'd be in New York now, the real thing, not an imitation," the younger man speculates, "and the blue-eyed ones would be wearing wigs and chewing gum while plucking their samisens...
...It might be the outline of a wry and weary smile or the prelude to tears, or just bemused abandonment to the buffet-ings of life...
...The traditional values are slowly disappearing as Japan becomes westernized...
...yet also sweeter, even in its sadness...
...Life meets it more than halfway, though withholding most of its climaxes...
...It is my fault," old Hirayama later declares, but is promptly relieved when his daughter receives the news with composure...
...She is 24— Michiko's age...
...Not that married life is all that smooth and easy, as we see by Koichi's and Akiko's example, and the sheepish way the elderly Horie defers to his young wife...
...Through a number of vaguely, sometimes imperceptibly related episodes, we follow Hirayama's awakening to the fact that Michiko must go off and marry if she is not to become a cold, unhappy creature like The Gourd's old-maid daughter...
...Yes, all alone in the end," he murmurs sadly...
...For it turns out that Miura, the intermediary in the golf-club deal, is the man Michiko has secretly loved...
...The camera just squats in those half-dozen or so locations successively, observing and listening...
...There is also Koichi, the elder son, married to the spirited Akiko and plagued by money problems that keep them sparring, though in the end Akiko always gets her way...
...We seldom go outdoors...
...they show how people change yet remain themselves: grow up, grow aware, grow old, grow resigned-not necessarily in that order, and not always all the way...
...Yet a tearful scene will contain something droll, and in the middle of a gay one something claws at our hearts...
...and Kazuo, his student son...
...his daughter Michiko, who keeps house for him...
...And because all the stages are balanced as neatly as a juggler's balls, we realize there are not, after all, so many of them-that life is shorter, plainer, sillier and sadder than we would think...
...Put most simply, Ozu paints with primary colors, but applies them with utmost subtlety...
...We have had intimations of his life back to his school davs and forward to his lonely death...
...as when, at the end, young Kazuo, from his bed...
...But it is right for Michiko to leave...
...shortly before the director's death from cancer at the age of 60...
...Be a good wife and be happy," her father lamely instructs her, exactly what he said to the secretary who was getting married...
...Hirayama eats and drinks at a restaurant with his two best friends: Kawai, another businessman, who urges him to agree to a good match that he could arrange for the 24-year-old Michiko...
...After he and his friends arrange a dinner for an old schoolteacher of theirs nicknamed The Gourd, Hirayama has to take the drunk old man home to his noodle shop, run by his joyless spinster daughter, who has grown old and sour caring for him...
...If not in a single person, then in a family circle or group of friends, we see all the ages of man connecting and interacting...
...The former chief petty officer plays the old navy march on the juke box, and they reminisce and muse about what would have happened had Japan won the War...
...Hirayama drinks, sings the naval march, and almost dozes off at the table...
...For it is the fathoming of this sadness that enables us to make that Ozu face with which we accomplish, as best and most gracefully we can, the transition to the inevitable next stage...
...These films are in touch with childhood and old age no less than with what lies between...
...Actually, the film begins at the office, where a secretary is about to get married and leave...
...Ozu has often been identified with the principal patriarch in his movies-usually played by Chishu Ryu, a lean, delicate-featured man, diffident, affable and philosophical-surrendering graciously, yet not without regret for the old modes, to the unavoidable...
...A ?m i.ways life goes on...
...But the new is gaining on all fronts...
...What makes these self-effacingly titled films so universal and basic, so totally what soap opera would be if only it knew how: art in its primary colors, embracing every human situation, fit for everyone...
...Although we may not remember his individual films clearly-they are so very much part of his recurring concerns as to merge into a shimmering continuum-we do recall scenes, moments and the bittersweet awareness that informs them...
...The humor can be toueh...
...As we watch them, it imprints itself also on us...
...it emerges that he is already engaged...
...There are about as many light-hearted sequences in An Autumn Afternoon as grave ones...
...Though Kazuo promises to fix breakfast in the morning, we know that, for all her domineering, Michiko took better care of the old man...
...It concerns Hirayama (Chishu Ryu), a widowed business executive...
...He had been interested in Michiko, until Koichi had implied that she was still too young...
...Koichi exclaims ruefully, but soon amends this to "It's the hand of fate," as they settle down to serious eating and drinking...
...Not much of a plot, yet it all hangs together, even such apparently random incidents as Akiko's and Koichi's spats over some secondhand golf clubs that Koichi wants to buy but cannot really afford...
...Finally the characters appear, usually in medium shots, and frequently looking straight into the camera...
...With almost unnoticeable pinpricks, he insinuates himself ever deeper into our consciousness, touching us a little here, amusing us a little there, making us face up to ourselves everywhere...
...the process is, as in a film (though not one by Ozu-he uses no such devices), a kind of slow crossfade from one image to another...
...But we do get revealing surprises...
...It's lucky we lost," Hirayama remarks...
...Locales are established by long shots, showing first the surrounding outdoors, then the indoors where the real business of living takes place...
...After having seen Michiko mostly in western garb, we go up with Hirayama and Koichi to her room on her wedding day...
...How poor our best wisdom is...
...Gradually, we fall under his beneficent spell, understanding life as seldom before, realizing the smallness of our achievements, but also the greatnesses in that smallness, which is all we have...
...the delighted fellow invites him for a drink at Torys Bar, where the barmaid reminds Hirayama of his dead wife—"if you don't look very closely...
...warns his father, still drinking away in his formal attire, to go easy on the sake—"Can't have you dying yet...
...She will accept a prearranged marriage...
...but at least the wedding costume links Michiko to the tradition, to all those women married off and told to make the most of it...
...The main locations are Hiraya-ma's office, his home, Kawai's house, Koichi's and Akiko's apartment, the above-mentioned restaurant, and Torys Bar...
...As people change, so does the Japan of the '40s, '50s and early '60s that he records with such affectionate melancholy...
...This static use of the camera is riveting: The viewer must remain more passively observant, a bit detached, as meanings rather than happenings register on him...
...however, was quite westernized, as Masahiro Shinoda, who used to be his assistant before becoming a prominent director himself, has told me...
...Then he sits down at the kitchen table with his back to us: He and the film have nothing further to say...
...There are no dissolves and no tracking shots, minimal pans and only the necessary erosscutting...
...The camera cuts to several quick shots of Michiko's vacated room, where her abandoned pier glass remains-as if to reflect the emptiness into infinity...
...Ozu could not have asked for a finer epitaph...
...in a corner, we barely note part of a manikin clothed in the elaborate traditional wedding attire...
...The acting is superlative...
...Even death, when it is recorded, comes imperceptibly: less as an event than as a transition...
...Often the moment is both funny and sad, as when the barmaid, seeing the formally dressed Hirayama arrive from his daughter's wedding, asks whether he's been to a funeral...
...the music honky-tonk, but suggestive of life's ultimate indifference...
...We never even glimpse the man Michiko marries...
...Very often in Ozu's films people wear an expression that is inscrutable-not because it is Oriental, but because it is rock-bottom human...
...Hirayama goes into the kitchen and pours himself some cold, weak tea out of the kettle...
...It is the Ozu expression, and occurs not only in his characters' faces-his very films are impregnated with it...
...Ozu photographs it mostly from that famous low angle of his, as if the camera were squatting on the tata-mi, watching everyone and everything go by...
...There is a reverse-angle shot, and the manikin turns out to be Michiko, immobile and more exquisite and pathetic than ever, yet also resolute...
...so much so that, instead of soy sauce, he put butter on his rice...
...and Professor Horei, who has just married a girl only a couple of years older than his own married daughter...
...Or, perhaps, a superimposure, where old manners and trappings mingle with new ones...
...The color photography is beautifully unassertive...
...So Koichi takes him to lunch and sounds him out...
...Ozu's films keep us continually cognizant of our life span as a whole...
...An Autumn Afternoon was Ozu's 53rd and last film, made in 1962...
...Ozu seems to deal in wavelets...
...what he captures is a flow...
...It is my fault...
...Upstairs in her room, Michiko cries, and keeps heartbreakingly twisting a tape measure around one hand, then around the other...
...There Hirayama meets a man who served on the destroyer he commanded during the War...
...Yet Hirayama insists on thinking of his daughter as a baby, so he can hold on to her...
Vol. 56 • May 1973 • No. 11
