Films/DVD Asylum

Posted by clarkjohnsen (R) on March 28, 2004 at 11:22:06

They're all coming to town. Help!

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More than meets the eye

Yasujiro Ozu's films are about the meaning behind the action

By Ty Burr, Boston Globe Staff, 3/28/2004

If you are one of those filmgoers for whom the languid poignancy of "Lost in Translation" was a long, cool tonic -- if the way the film seemed to drift with larger purpose enchanted rather than enraged you -- you are ready for the films of Yasujiro Ozu.

True, the great Japanese director has been dead for 40 years, but his work is timeless, and almost all of it will be on display starting Friday at the Harvard Film Archive. Together with the Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies at Harvard and the Japan Society of Boston, the HFA is presenting a monthlong retrospective in celebration of the centennial of Ozu's birth.

Ozu's was the mastery that never shows off. The "Lost in Translation" comparison is instructive: An Ozu film has the same bemused, arm's-length love for characters, the same gulf between what is said and what is meant, the same contemplative pace that lays all things bare in good time -- only in a form far more graceful and distilled than "Translation" director Sofia Coppola manages. What happens in Ozu is not what's seen but what lies behind what's seen, and if that means you sometimes have to work a bit, it also means these movies flower and deepen at the oddest times. All of which makes them sound like delicate little things, when in fact they can be funny, haunting, earthy, delightful, clear-eyed, and devastating. You do have to make the necessary adjustments to your movie-watching metabolism, and you have to embrace a visual style that seems perversely pared down to basics. Almost every shot in an Ozu film is from the point of view of a person seated on a household tatami mat, with characters directly addressing the camera.

The subject, too, is often the same from film to film: the Japanese family and the way it peels apart as children move into maturity and parents into old age. In the latter half of his career, Ozu went so far as to make the same plot several times over, with similar titles and the same actors. A daughter doesn't want to marry and leave her beloved parent, usually a father, but circumstances conspire to bring about a gentle separation -- this is the story of "Early Summer" (1951), "Late Autumn" (1960), "An Autumn Afternoon" (1962), and the heartbreakingly fine "Late Spring" (1949). Is such repetition monomania, or is it unoriginality -- or is it Monet painting the Rouen Cathedral over and over, in different light and in different seasons?

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