Tokyo Story

Shukichi: Look how big Tokyo is.

Tomi: Yes isn't it. If we got lost, we may never find eachother again.

Time and time again, I am drawn to "Tokyo Story". When I revisit it, it's like going to see an old friend, a calming friend who can take away my anxieties, and lets me live in peace for a few hours.

It's been awhile since I have written anything about "Tokyo Story", for those of you loyal to this blog since its very beginning, you should know how high I regard this masterpiece. I turn to this film at least twice a year, I turn to its director Yasujiro Ozu almost constantly.

In my mind Ozu was a master, and for me the greatest of all filmmakers. Ozu's unique style challenged and renewed my whole perception of cinema. No one has made a film, or can make a film quite like Ozu. I feel if you dared to try, you would only fail. Ozu liked to strip down his films to the bare essentials, keeping his story and his characters purposely within the world of the mundane, (It has been said, you could sum up the plot of an Ozu film with just one sentence). Although his situations could've been exploited for the use of melodrama, Ozu rarely went down that road, he stuck with the realism within the situation, that's why there is rarely a false note within his films.

As his theme, Ozu mainly stuck with one subject, the family in dissolution, and "Tokyo Story" is the best that represents this. It's the story of an elderly couple named Shukichi and Tomi who travel to Tokyo to see their children. At the beginning, we get the sense that Shukichi and Tomi don't get to see their children all that much anymore, and this visit may very well be the last chance they get to see them.

When they arrive, they stay with their son, who is a neighbourhood doctor, he isn't very successful, but he has a family of his own with a wife and two kids. The parent's visit eventually become a bit of an inconvenience. One of the children is unhappy to give up his room for them to stay in, then the son must cancel their outing one Sunday due to a sick patient.

Later the couple stay with their daughter, who runs a beauty salon, again they become a burden to her daily life, and she decides to turn them over to their daughter-in-law Noriko (the beaming Setsuko Hara). Noriko was married to the couple's son who was killed in the war, yet it is she, and not their blood relatives who shows Shukichi and Tomi the most compassion.

The couple soon become too much of an inconvenience for the children to handle, so they are sent to a spa. As if like a bad joke, the spa isn't at all relaxing, with noisy occupants making it unbearable. The couple soon decide to leave for home early, only then do we discover with the slightest of tremors, something isn't right.

"Tokyo Story" is a rewarding film, it touches on so many things that are universal, you can only start to understand it after multiple viewings. This is a story about family, it could be any family anywhere, it's about our hopes, and our disappointments, and about our missed chances and opportunities. This is a profoundly sad film, but it is also a life affirming one. Life is full of disappointments, but Ozu shows with the gentle compassion of his characters that it is also full of humanity, and that's a beautiful thing.

When I first saw "Tokyo Story", I proclaimed to myself that this was the way movies should be made. I thought for the first time, I had actually seen life as it really was, depicted on screen. I had this personal bias for a long time, especially as I was discovering more of Ozu's films, it felt as if I had just seen my very first real movie, it was exciting.

To paraphrase something Roger Ebert said about Ozu, "all movie lovers eventually make their way to his films." For me that's just what it was for me, I had just finished film school thinking I had seen everything, and suddenly I came to Ozu, and "Tokyo Story", and a whole new chapter in my life began. I think if there was a film I would want to share to the world, it would be this one, for I would want them to feel the same way I did when I first saw it, and hopefully you would.