Floating Weeds (Ukigusa)

FLOATING WEEDS (Ukigusa)      B+                  

Japan  (119 mi)  1959  d:  Yasujirô Ozu

A man who is ungrateful is not a human being at all.         —Kichinosuke (Kôji Mitsui)

Following Hitchcock’s 1956 remake of his own 1934 film, The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956), Ozu followed suit where this story is virtually identical to the original, A Story of Floating Weeds (Ukigusa Monogatari) (1934), changing the setting from a remote mountain town in northern Japan to an island town in southern Japan, where the closeness to the sea offers not only a sense of reflection and longing, but some of the most beautiful shots in the film.  This is one of the few films in Ozu’s career that was not made by his parent Shochiku Film Studio where he was employed for thirty years, instead choosing the Daiei Motion Picture Company.  Perhaps one of the reasons was the opportunity to work with actress Machiko Kyô from Kurosawa’s RASHOMON (1950) and Mizoguchi’s UGETSU (1953), a longstanding member of the Daiei Production Company since 1949, while also availing himself the opportunity to work with Mizoguchi’s renowned cinematographer Kazuo Miyagawa who also happened to shoot both of those films.  For many viewers this may be the most beautiful film they’ve ever seen, even on a DVD Technicolor transfer, where what’s most startling about the remake is the brilliant use of color, the second of only six color films in his entire career, where every transitional composition is a stand-alone work of art literally saturated with color, offering a connected series of unforgettable still life images spread throughout the film, adding a heightened sense of drama to the portrayal of ordinary moments.  The story again follows the exploits of a barely surviving traveling theater company headed by Komajuro (Ganjirô Nakamura) and his lead actress Sumiko, Machiko Kyô, one of the greatest of all Asian actresses, brilliant and petulant as always, easily the best thing in this version.  Kôji Mitsui, who played the son in the original version, plays a fellow actor in the theater company, the only one in both versions.  The Floating Weeds of the title refers to the drifting quality of the wandering troupe itself, where Kyô's character in one of their plays refers nostalgically to a group of disbanding comrades as “roaming aimlessly to the end of the world.”   

The similarities between the films are endlessly comparable, from the arrival of a train to the arrival of a boat, from characters complaining of the rain to similar complaints about the heat, to the use of banners waving announcing the arrival of the theater in town, where there is even a similar humorous use of an introductory shaving sequence.  In this scene there is an intentional subtitle error, making humorous reference to internationally renowned Kurosawa actor Toshirô Mifune, though his name is never spoken, instead there is likely a reference to little known (outside Japan) Japanese actor Kinnnosuke Yorozuya.  The opening shot, however, recalls Kiarostami’s FIVE DEDICATED TO OZU (2003), a beautiful shot of the distant sea that juxtaposes the similar shapes of a lighthouse and a sake bottle to the chugging sounds of an unseen motor heard from a boat moving through the harbor.  Of interest, one slow moving shot from a boat at sea shows the lighthouse on the beach, the only moving camera shot in all of Ozu's color films.  The use of sound is immediately apparent in the choice of percussive theater music played by the actors as they arrive in town, accompanied by a wordless procession of marching children following them down the sidewalks and narrow streets, offering a unique claustrophobic intimacy with houses literally on top of one another, where the musical theme plays throughout like a recurring Nino Rota Fellini theme.  As this film is 35 minutes longer than the original, the dialogue is more extensive, allowing greater background detail than in a silent film, where the meeting between Komajuro and Oyoshi (Haruko Sugimura), the woman he left behind with a grown son Kiyoshi (Hiroshi Kawaguchi) who still thinks of him as his wayward uncle, accentuate a theme of growing old, where Komajuro fears she will become lonesome.  The overblown theatrical production itself shows Kyô interestingly playing a man’s role, reflective of exaggeration and a relatively crude form of old-fashioned populist nostalgia, where the audience largely consists of smoking grandparents and bored grandchildren continually munching on candy. 

When Sumiko gets wind of Komajuro’s secret visits to another woman, the conflict between the two is similarly expressed through a protracted argument on the street in the rain, where in each version he tells her “My son belongs to a better world than yours.”  The reason he’s never identified himself as the father is he’s too ashamed of his lowly position in life, where his only hope is that his son will not follow in his footsteps and instead get educated, where an entire new set of opportunities present themselves to him.  Like the original, there is an identical backstage scene of Sumiko sitting in front of a mirror applying kabuki makeup alongside actress Kayo (Ayoko Wakao, another frequent Mizoguchi actress, positively gorgeous seen here:  Full-size image), urging her to seduce Kiyoshi and poison his bright future.  One huge difference here is Oyoshi’s attitude, heartbroken and grief stricken in the earlier version, but more openly accepting of the circumstances here even after the possibilities of having a real family start to unravel.  Her acceptance of the loss and resignation that comes from living so many years as a broken family completely alters the tone of the finale, shifting the emphasis of the ending from bleak tragedy, even as it similarly takes place in an empty train station after the troupe has disbanded from financial hardship.  In the original, the psychological horror included the father’s humiliating realization that he could never be accepted as a real father because he abandoned his child for twenty years, creating an insurmountable emotional void, but while acknowledged, that’s not the emphasis here where the focus shifts from the tragedy inflicted upon the real mother to the abandoned theatrical mother, Sumiko, who has also been tossed out of her makeshift family and also finds herself childless and alone.  While this updated version features a gorgeously improved  aesthetic that is quite unlike anything else, the more concise original contains the superior storytelling, better acting, and a greater impactive sense of tragic loss, as the drama lags in this overlong version where time literally stands still, where the bittersweet sadness doesn’t come so much from the emptiness of opportunities lost, but from the vantage point of an aging, more mature man who can overlook the vast horizon that has been his entire life, knowing full well that life’s greatest fulfillments are likely behind and not ahead of him.