There Was a Father (1942)

Chichi ariki, Japan, 87 minutes
Director: Yasujiro Ozu
Writers: Tadao Ikeda, Yasujiro Ozu, Takao Yanai
Photography: Yuharu Atsuta
Music: Kyoichi Saiki
Editor: Yoshiyasu Hamamura
Cast: Chishu Ryu, Shuji Sano, Haruhiko Tsuda, Mitsuko Mito, Shin Saburi

Criterion editions are often little masterpieces themselves of restoration, but even their print of this picture by director Yasujiro Ozu is badly damaged, suggesting the neglect it may have suffered since its Imperial Japan release date, when it was a modest success. Yet now it's almost as if that were the plan: the abrupt cuts, the missing time (seven missing minutes under the oversight of Douglas MacArthur), and the hissing audio, which sometimes drowns dialogue. They actually work to underline the poignant and affecting themes, which focus on loss, where the heart barely has speech. On one level it's a story of duty and well-meaning (and arguably necessary) neglect, but what is produced is a heartsick kid and man, a vivid and painful unrequited love that an only son feels for his father, who was widowed when the boy was still quite young.

It's like Fred MacMurray and My One Son and profoundly tragic. At the time of the movie the father, Shuhei Horikawa (the always impressive Chishu Ryu, one of Ozu's regular players), has apparently come to terms with his wife's death, but we see him take on even more baggage. As a strict but beloved schoolteacher, dubbed "the Badger" by students, he escorts his students on an annual field trip involving overnights. One year a student, disobeying his admonitions, takes a boat out rowing. It capsizes and the student drowns. Horikawa blames himself and retires from teaching. At first it gives him more time to spend with his son, but he soon realizes they must live apart. His career is now more itinerant and he believes, probably rightly, that stability is what's important for his son. He places the boy in a boarding school when he is not yet even 12. They will never live together again.

Late Spring (1949)

Banshun, Japan, 108 minutes
Director: Yasujiro Ozu
Writers: Kazuo Hirotsu, Kogo Noda, Yasujiro Ozu
Photography: Yuharu Atsuta
Music: Senji Ito
Editor: Yoshiyasu Hamamura
Cast: Chishu Ryu, Setsuko Hara, Haruko Sugimura, Yumeji Tsukioka, Jun Usami, Masao Mishima

Late Spring seems like a typical movie for director and cowriter Yasujiro Ozu, but perhaps that's because it's the first of the last long phase of his moviemaking career, when he addressed the rich themes of postwar middle-class Japanese family life that he would work for nearly the next 15 years. It's not that it's such a great departure from what he had done before, but the war was obviously a huge disruption in all Japanese life, not just Ozu's. This movie heralds a modified new direction in many ways, even down to the title conceit of a particular time of year.

Some of those others, which include Early Summer (1951), Early Spring (1956), and Late Autumn (1960), may actually be closer to the conceits of English-speaking marketers, as the original Japanese titles in some cases have little or nothing to do with seasons. But Banshun, the Japanese title for this tender story of the transitional relationship between a father and his daughter of marrying age, translates specifically to "late spring," which would make it, metaphorically speaking, approximately the marrying month of June. Indeed, marriage is all that anyone around Professor Somiya (Chishu Ryu) and his daughter Noriko (Setsuko Hara) seems to have on their mind, until finally, even inevitably, it infects them too.

Tokyo Story (1953)

#17: Tokyo Story (Yasujiro Ozu, 1953)

So far—well, at least until yesterday—the three of us have shown admirable restraint in using the term "masterpiece," but I'm going to go ahead and break it out for this one. Few such films so uniformly praised to the skies by critics have worked on me so powerfully and so consistently, and indeed few others by Ozu himself have either (though I still have a good number of gaps there and have seen at least one, Early Summer, that's certainly in range). It bears a poignant sadness at every point, even before the various complications of the characters begin to emerge, yet carries as well a bittersweet joy that it sustains by staying so rigorously within itself—expertly balancing carefully observed examples of kindness and indifference.

The typical knock on Ozu pictures is that they are slow and "nothing happens" (another couple of ideas that Steven beat me to in yesterday's piece on L'Avventura, followed by Phil, Jack, Dave and everybody in comments). I wouldn't be inclined to characterize Tokyo Story that way myself, but I can see how someone might. In its plot details, it's about as simple as could be: an aging couple (played with understated yet unfailing charm by Ozu regulars Chishu Ryu and Chieko Higashiyama) takes a trip from their small seaside village in Japan to visit their grown children and families in postwar Tokyo. Once there, they find the children and grandchildren busy with their lives, shunting them from place to place, on day trips and at one point to a resort more appropriate for younger people, even as the children keep exclaiming how wonderful it is to see them. In conversations with one another, however, they tend to roll their eyes and shake their heads over what to do about entertaining their parents. Upon the couple's return to the village, the old woman takes ill. The children assemble for the death scene and the funeral, and then are on their ways again. The end.

Tokyo Story (1953)

Tôkyô monogatari, Japan, 136 minutes
Director: Yasujiro Ozu
Writers: Kogo Noda, Yasujiro Ozu
Photography: Yuharu Atsuta
Music: Kojun Saito
Editor: Yoshiyasu Hamamura
Cast: Chishū Ryū, Chieko Higashiyama, Setsuko Hara, Haruko Sugimura, Sō Yamamura, Kuniko Miyake, Kyōko Kagawa, Eijirō Tono, Nobuo Nakamura, Shirō Osaka

It feels a little funny to start a discussion of Tokyo Story with an explicit warning about spoilers. After all, the movie is 58 years old and already among the best known and most celebrated in cinema history—and one in which it might even fairly be argued anyway that "nothing happens." The warning may be even stranger when you recall (as you may) that I have never before been particularly concerned about offering up such niceties.

But the fact remains that, for me, it was the many small surprises encountered along the way here that led directly to the giant heartache imparted so expertly by this one. It's slow, concerned almost exclusively with the humdrum, transcendent only in the sneakiest backdoor ways. But in the end, suddenly, it takes on colossal proportions and swells into something undeniably great—a towering masterpiece, there I said it, and easily the best I've seen yet from the titles at the loftiest perches of the list compiled at They Shoot Pictures, Don't They? And it was the slow and steady accretion of revelations the first time I saw it that contributed a good deal to the effect it had on me. I wouldn't want to take that away from anyone, so listen up everybody, spoilers ahead.