A STORY OF FLOATING WEEDS (Ukigusa Monogatari) B+
Japan (89 mi) 1934 d: Yasujirô Ozu
Floating weeds, drifting down the leisurely river of our lives. —Japanese expression
Ozu’s films were rarely seen outside Japan until a decade or more after his death from cancer in 1963, so he was a late bloomer in the West which lauded the earlier works of both Kenji Mizoguchi and Akira Kurosawa, which were more accessible in the 60’s when America was also under the thrall of discovering European films. Unlike Mizoguchi’s more theatrical use of long takes and exquisite camera movement or Kurosawa’s notorious art direction and action sequences, Ozu is among the most understated directors in film history, one of the original minimalists, refusing to embellish his works with close ups or pans, using fixed objects for his transition shots instead of fades or dissolves. He shot almost solely from a fixed low camera angle, often called the tatami shot, reflecting the eye level of someone sitting on a tatami floor mat, quietly observing, using conversation, and the accumulation of character detail to advance the story. Often choosing a portrait of ordinary Japanese life, marriage and families, relationships and generational distance, many distributors felt Ozu’s stylistic restraint and passivity would never be accepted in the West, an argument that persists to this day since he’s only been embraced by true cinephiles. There is little accentuated distinction between Ozu’s heroes and villains, often seen as one and the same, where he developed a simple and contemplative style tinged with nostalgia and sadness. Like Chaplin, Ozu continued to make silent films during the early era of talking pictures, waiting for the audio technology to improve, up until 1936 when THE ONLY SON (Hitori Musuko) was his first to utilize sound. Coming after the success of the incisive family comedy I WAS BORN…BUT (1932), this was Ozu’s most acclaimed silent film, both critically and commercially, one that he remade in 1959 as FLOATING WEEDS, where he transports the same story into a different setting.
This is one of the earliest Ozu films that explores not only the family, but offers a variation on the typical family structure, where the aspirations are influenced by class division and social status, and in particular a patriarchal Japanese society, which can be both fascinating and revolting, where disappointment and disillusionment become key thematic elements. This deconstruction of a typical Japanese family would become a prevalent theme throughout his career. Strangely, the actors all wear kimonos throughout the film, where up to this point in Ozu’s career, people lived in Tokyo and to a large extent wore Western clothes. The title refers to a group of traveling kabuki actors who seem to be drifting aimlessly, wandering through the countryside where they are barely eking out a living, always short of funds, yet much of that is due to their own bad habits of drinking and smoking excessively, the women as freely as the men, which places them outside the standards of normal society, where this would not be viewed as acceptable behavior. What we see of their stage performance is pretty rudimentary, though receives wild applause in the provinces until a deluge of rain cuts their performance short. In this interlude of monotony when they’re forced to sit out days of endless rain, their troupe leader Kihachi (Takeshi Sakamoto) mysteriously disappears into town where he revisits a former lover Otsune (Chôko Iida) and his own 20-year old son Shinkichi (Kôji Mitsui), though due to his continuing disappearing act of heading back on the road, he assumes the role of a traveling uncle. However, the time they spend together plays out like a reverie, where the father and son body movement is remarkably in synch, casting their lures together while fishing in the river or both eating corn on the cob while playing a board game.
However, when Itaka (Rieko Yagumo), the leading actress and current lover of Kihachi finds out what he’s been up to, she devilishly plots a scheme of revenge, setting the unsuspecting son up with another one of the troupe’s actresses, Otoki (Yoshiko Tsubouchi), hoping to hurt both the father and the son for toying with and underestimating her emotions. Itaka’s continual chain-smoking throughout has a way of shedding a dark light onto her character, as she’s singled out as the conniving, behind-the-scenes instigator. Otsune, by contrast, is the wronged woman, older and certainly no threat to the younger Itaka’s vanity, as she’s done nothing to deserve the melodramatic wrath of an indignant and jealous actress. Surprisingly, however, Otoki changes her mind about her initial motives and discovers a newfound love in the arms of Shinkichi, where Ozu uses a recurring motif of his parked bicycle to reflect both the passing of time as well as time offscreen spent together. With his troupe’s leading women conceiving a plot against him, Kihachi finds himself thoroughly humiliated and outmaneuvered, inflicting blows to all participants involved. But his feeble efforts only reveal the futility of his position, as despite sending money, he’s literally abandoned his son for twenty years, creating a chasm of inconsolable emptiness between father and son, while the desperate financial straits of his theater troupe force him to sell all the costumes and props, effectively breaking up his business and substitute family as well. Ozu’s startling emotional resolution is surprising for its abrupt change of tone, where the one shining light in this film is the gorgeously restrained performance of Chôko Iida, confined to the background through most of the film, overshadowed by the prominence of showier roles, yet her gentle expression of bleak despair is hauntingly penetrating.
