The Final Stage of Ozu: ‘Tokyo Story’ & ‘Floating Weeds’
Originally published in Counter Arts on June 6, 2025.
Only the best can evoke the cycle of life and all its intricacies and broadness through a concentrated story of a single family. Yasujirō Ozu is one of the best, and Tokyo Story (1953) is maybe the greatest example in cinema of such a story, one of a relatively small number I’d argue should be rewatched. It’s a tall ask given the demands of daily life, the prerequisite patience required for most of Ozu’s work, and the enormous multiple platform watchlists of a typical consumer, but with a focus on Ozu’s choices, the reward for successive viewings can be deeply affecting:
His compositions, symmetrical with the house interiors but angled when not within a house, are reflective of the formality of traditional Japanese family life (interior) and how post-war Tokyo (and Japan at large) is “progressing” away from traditionalism and toward Westernism (exterior); with knowledge of the film’s complete events, the formalism is more obvious and adopts its own comment. His near-unanimously static camera sets up its only movement — a tracking shot — to poignantly elicit the central theme that life moves onward, a powerful technical flash whose real-time foresight is more dramatic even than its recall with hindsight. The “still life” shots (which became known as “pillow shots”) aren’t unlike modern yamato-e paintings, in which there’s more to discover than a single watch can support. And, famous of Ozu’s work, he exempts information — the “ellipses” — asking of us to infer events and relationships through context and empathy, and to mind the details of character, place, dialogue, and time, all of which is an impressive task for a first experience.
The act of rewatching it, beyond affording the agency of attention to make new discoveries, reinforces the cyclical nature of life (and family), and also further familiarizes us with each character, as if ourselves married into a family for which we can only gradually get to know.
A Story of Floating Weeds, about a traveling kabuki troop’s leader and his complicated relationship with his son and his son’s mother, was released in 1932, and was Ozu’s penultimate silent film. It’s a fine work, but predates Ozu’s mastery of the medium; from the late-’20s through the early-’30s, he made a mix of comedies and crime movies not considered to be “serious” in nature. Nearly three decades later, he remade the film as Floating Weeds.
Maybe it’s the change of setting from a shantytown to a beautiful seaside village (causing one of my favorite opening shots in cinema), maybe it’s the natural buoyancy of technicolor, maybe it’s the fluidity of actor performance and Ozu’s assured — and refined, by this point — storytelling uninterrupted by intertitles; but the story feels gentler, more cathartic than the original, and arguably nimbler despite running 30 minutes longer.
Produced after completing Good Morning, his most jubilant film (also a remake of one of his earlier films, also in stunning technicolor, and in which Ozu’s regularly touching intergenerational disconnect is navigated with lighthearted riffing on adult seriousness and belated Western influences like consumerism and television obsession), one senses through this rework a contentment in the filmmaker: by the time of Floating Weeds’ release in November 1959, he’d years ago perfected his style, achieved domestic commercial stardom and regard as a master with Tokyo Story, and just prior, in 1958, was recognized internationally with the same regard by critics and other filmmakers when Tokyo Story screened at the London Film Festival. The subtle tonal differences — and the astonishing photography — make, for me, a more enjoyable, memorable experience, and encapsulate Ozu’s late-age evolution, his career in its final form.