Quote:
Noriko, 28, is a secretary in a small company in Tokyo. She is a modern young woman but she still lives with her parents, just like her brother, his wife and their two children. She is under great pressure from her family; in fact, it is not reasonable at this age not to have yet married. But the young girl rejoices in her independence. Her boss offers her a good deal of his knowledge but Noriko hesitates until a sort of illumination solves the problem for her, at least…

Bakushu - Yasujiro Ozu (1951) 1080p + commentary.mkv

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https://nitro.download/view/57844721D5BA3BE/Bakushu_-_Yasujiro_Ozu_(1951)_1080p_+_commentary.mkv

Language(s):Japanese
Subtitles:English, French, Portuguese

The post Yasujirô Ozu – Bakushû aka Early summer (1951) (HD) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

PLOT: A kabuki actor’s mistress hatches a jealous plot to bring down her lover’s son.

A.Story.of.Floating.Weeds.1934.Yasujiro.Ozu.576p.BluRay.DD5.1.x264.mkv

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Language(s):Japanese intertitles
Subtitles:English, Chinese, French

The post Yasujirô Ozu – Ukikusa monogatari AKA A Story of Floating Weeds (1934) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Quote:
One of the earliest surviving silent comedies by master filmmaker Yasujiro Ozu, A Straightforward Boy is a rambunctious, adorable kidnapping caper now screening in a new restoration that restores to it eight long-lost and recently rediscovered minutes. The short features one of the all-time great child actors, Tomio Aoki, at age six and in his first starring role as the titular boy all too happy to be abducted – so long as his petty-crook captors (Tatsuo Saitô and Takeshi Sakamoto) are willing to endure his company. Aoki’s extraordinary career would go on to include over 300 films, from Ozu’s 1932 I Was Born, But… to Seijun Suzuki’s 2001 Pistol Opera.

A Straightforward Boy (Ozu, 1929).mkv

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https://nitro.download/view/554FCAE3484B2CA/A_Straightforward_Boy_(Ozu,_1929).mkv

Language(s):Japanese intertitles
Subtitles:English (hard)

The post Yasujirô Ozu – Tokkan kozô AKA A Straightforward Boy (1929) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Quote:
Shukichi is a professor, a widower, absorbed in his work. His unmarried daughter, Noriko, runs his household for him. Both are perfectly content with this arrangement until the old man’s sister declares that her niece should get married. Noriko is, after all, in her mid-20s; in Japan in 1949, a single woman that old is approaching the end of her shelf life. His sister warns the professor that after his death Noriko will be left alone in the world; it is his duty to push her out of the nest and find a husband who can support her. The professor reluctantly agrees. When his daughter opposes any idea of marriage, he tells her he is also going to remarry. That is a lie, but he will sacrifice his own comfort for his daughter’s future. She marries.

And that, essentially, is what happens on the surface in Yasujiro Ozu’s “Late Spring” (1949). What happens at deeper levels is angry, passionate and — wrong, we feel, because the father and the daughter are forced to do something neither one of them wants to do, and the result will be resentment and unhappiness. Only the aunt will emerge satisfied, and Noriko’s husband, perhaps, although we never see him. “He looks like Gary Cooper, around the mouth, but not the top part,” the aunt tells her.

It is typical of Ozu that he never shows us the man Noriko will marry. In his next film, “Early Summer” (1951), the would-be bride in an arranged marriage sees the groom only in a golfing photo that obscures his face. Ozu is not telling traditional romantic stories. He is intently watching families where the status quo is threatened by an outsider; what matters to the brides is not what they are beginning but what they are ending.

The women in both films are named Noriko, and they are both played by Setsuko Hara, a great star who would drop everything to work with Ozu. When the studio asked Ozu to consider a different actress for the second film, he refused to make it without Hara.

In “Early Summer,” Noriko lives with her brother, his family, and their aged parents. She has no desire to marry — at least, not the golfer. The same actor, Chishu Ryu (1904-1993) plays the professor in the first film and the brother in the second; in Ozu’s “Tokyo Story” (1953), he plays the grandfather and Hara is his daughter-in-law. In all three films he looks the correct age for his character; how he did that so convincingly between the ages of 45 and 49 is beyond my ability to explain.

“Late Spring” began a cycle of Ozu films about families; the seasons in the title refer to the times in the lives of the characters, as in his final film, “An Autumn Afternoon” (1962). Did he make the same film again and again? Not at all. “Late Spring” and “Early Summer” are startlingly different. In the second, Noriko takes advantage of a conversational opening to overturn the entire plot; to avoid marrying the golfer, she accepts a man she has known for a long time — a widower with a child, whose mother’s dearest wish is that her son marry Noriko. The man goes along with his mother’s plan, indeed is pleased once he absorbs it; the meddling woman in this case has made two people happier.

“Late Spring” tells a story that becomes sadder the more you think about it. There is a tension in the film between Noriko’s smile and her feelings. Her smile is often a mask. She smiles brightly during a strange early scene where she talks with a family friend, Onodera, who has remarried after the death of his wife. Such a second marriage is “filthy and foul,” she says, and it disgusts her. She smiles, he laughs. Yet she is very serious.

Onodera tells the professor it’s his duty to marry off Noriko, and suggests an excellent prospect: Hattori, the professor’s assistant. Noriko and Hattori take a bicycle trip to the beach, and later have dinner; we think perhaps such a match will work. But when Shukichi suggests it to his daughter, she laughs and tells him Hattori is already engaged. How and when she learned that is left offscreen; what we do see is Hattori inviting her to a concert, her telling him she doesn’t want to make “trouble,” and Hattori at the concert with his hat on an empty seat. There is the possibility that Noriko could have married Hattori after all; she likes him, he likes her, he might leave his fiancee; the concert invitation is crucial, but she will not leave her father. This is her sacrifice, to match his later in the film.

Now Masa (Haruko Sugimura), her aunt, comes up with a new candidate, the Gary Cooper look-alike named Satake. Noriko tells her friend, “I think he looks more like the local electrician.” Realizing that Noriko will not willingly leave her father, Masa proposes to the professor that he marry a younger widow, Mrs. Miwa. The professor is as happy as his daughter to remain single, but understands Masa’s scheme to deceive Noriko.

Ozu brings everything to a head during an extraordinary scene at a Noh performance, where Noriko sits next to her father. The professor nods across the room to Mrs. Miwa, who smiles and nods back. Noriko observes this and loses all interest in the play; her head bows in sadness, and afterward she tells her father, “I have to go away somewhere,” and all but flees from his side.

There’s a later scene of uncomfortable confrontation. “Will you marry?” Noriko asks him. “Um,” he says, with the slightest nod. She asks him three or four different ways. “Um.” Finally, “that woman we saw today?” “Um.” He defends arranged marriages: “Your mother wasn’t happy at first. I found her weeping in the kitchen many times.” Not the best argument for a father trying to convince his daughter to marry.

Masa the aunt, having proposed the new groom, now acts as if it is a settled thing, and begins to plan the approaching marriage. Noriko goes along, smiling as always. We see her beautiful but sad in her traditional wedding dress, but we do not see her wedding or meet her husband. Instead, we come home alone with the professor, who admits his own marriage plans were “the biggest lie I ever told.” In one of the saddest scenes ever filmed by Ozu, he sits alone in his room and begins to peel an apple. The peel grows longer and longer until his hand stops and it falls to the floor and he bows his head in grief.

The professor’s decision is often described as his “sacrifice” of her. And so it is, but not one he wants to make. Nor does she want to leave. “I love helping you,” she says, “Marriage wouldn’t make me any happier. You can remarry, but I want to be at your side.” There is an academic paper exploring the possibility of repressed incest in “Late Spring,” but I doubt that occurred to Ozu; Noriko has a hidden well of disgust about sex, I believe, which is revealed in her strong feelings about remarriage — once is bad enough. She wants to stay safe in her home with her father, forever.

“Late Spring” is one of the best two or three films Ozu ever made, with “Early Summer” deserving comparison. Both films use his distinctive later visual style, which includes precise compositions for a camera that almost never moves, a point of view often representing the eye-level of a person sitting on a tatami mat, and punctuation through cutaways to unrelated exteriors. He almost always used only one lens, a 50mm, which he said was the closest to the human eye.

Here he wordlessly uses time and space to establish the routine and serenity of the household arrangements between father and daughter, in a sequence showing them coming and going, upstairs and down, through the rooms and central corridors of their house. They know their way around each other. Late in the film, threatened by the marriage, Noriko keeps picking things up and putting them on a table, compulsively acting out her domestic happiness.

So much happens out of sight in the film, implied but not shown. Noriko smiles but is not happy. Her father passively accepts what he hates is happening. The aunt is complacent, implacable, maddening. She gets her way. It is universally believed, just as in a Jane Austen novel, that a woman of a certain age is in want of a husband. “Late Spring” is a film about two people who desperately do not believe this, and about how they are undone by their tact, their concern for each other, and their need to make others comfortable by seeming to agree with them.

Late.Spring.1949.720p.Blu-ray.AAC2.0.x264-!.mkv

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https://nitro.download/view/3BB74EA0EA70071/Late.Spring.1949.720p.Blu-ray.AAC2.0.x264-!.mkv

Language(s):Japanese
Subtitles:English

The post Yasujirô Ozu – Banshun AKA Late Spring (1949) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

東京物語

They one hot beautiful summer day joyfully left home
She one hot sad day stumbled sideways
He strangely found himself back home
one of those so beautiful noisy hot summer days one says

Jonathan Rosenbaum wrote:
The consistent use of a low, eye-level camera angle in the later works makes one realize that the eye level of most films is that of a standing spectator. But Ozu’s acknowledgment and use of the fact that we watch movies while seated is only one of his subtle strategies for drawing us into his tight family circles. Perhaps most striking of all is the absolutely equal distribution of love and generosity towards all of his characters — implicit in HEN IN THE WIND, but triumphant in such later masterpieces as LATE SPRING, EARLY SUMMER, and TOKYO STORY (1953).

Tokyo monogatari - Yasujiro Ozu (1953).mkv

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https://nitro.download/view/5F6976D5568BA37/Tokyo_monogatari_-_Yasujiro_Ozu_(1953).mkv

Language(s):Japanese
Subtitles:English, Japanese

The post Yasujirô Ozu – Tôkyô monogatari aka Tokyo story (1953) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Quote:
“Sooner or later, everyone who loves movies comes to Ozu. He is the quietest and gentlest of directors, the most humanistic, the most serene.” — Roger Ebert

It took long enough, but I sampled my first Yasujiro Ozu film, Good Morning (Ohayo), and will soon indulge myself with as many of his works as I can locate. At one time, his films were thought to be “too Japanese” and weren’t available in the West, but if Good Morning is any indication of his craft and appeal, Ozu deserves a much wider audience. It’s a film that works at multiple levels, and only artistic geniuses like Shakespeare have been able to pull off such a universal work that works with both down to earth people and with the upper levels of critical audiences equally.

Seen at the surface, Good Morning comes across as a comedy, filled with mistaken assumptions and long running flatulence jokes and memorable characters. Set in 1950’s suburban Tokyo in a tightly knit housing complex that brings forth remembrances of Malvina Reynolds’ “Little Boxes,” the plot weaves four household stories together without misstep. The women are embroiled in a “who-dunit” intrigue about missing club dues, suspecting the woman who has just purchased a washing machine, an unemployed English teacher can only speak banalities to the woman he loves, an older retired man on meager means habitually gets humorously drunk and can’t find his own home (they all look alike), and two young boys stage a tantrum and practice a stubborn “vow of silence” when their parents refuse to buy a television set.

Painting his cinematic palate with bright colors to create a light-hearted and joyful film, Ozu offers well paced vignettes of each of the ensemble cast that are as pointedly direct as are his consistent straight on shots. Each character receives ample medium and close-up shots that give the impression of their sincerity—the emotions are outspoken and nothing hidden.

The central story revolving around the television set that brothers Minoru (Koji Shigaragi, age 13) and Isamu (Masahiko Shimazu, age 7) so adamantly desire expose character and thinking in transitional Japan of the 1950s, an era when “made in Japan” was a running joke about cheaply made products. All the neighborhood boys gather daily at a young couple’s apartment to watch Sumo wrestling, and the parents have discovered that their sons have been lying about doing their homework and ban them from visiting the neighbors with the TV. Minoru and Isamu’s middle class parents can afford a TV, but the father doesn’t want a TV because it will “produce 100 million idiots.”

Minoru demands that they join the “modern age” and get a TV so they won’t have to watch at the neighbors and childishly cries and throws a massive tantrum, which his younger copy cat brother parallels. Their motives are simple to understand, as is the mother’s natural reaction against the power play and the father’s chauvinistic chiding that they are acting like women and for them to “shut up.”

Adding another dimension are the wide ranging effects the two boys have on the entire little community when they begin their silent strike. Just the act of not greeting the neighbors sets off another series of rumors about the household, concerns at school (they refuse to talk there as well), and inspires their English tutor to reflect on how banal greetings and idle talk act like “lubricant” to keep society flowing properly. Thinking of his love for the boys’ older sister, he muses,

”But important things are difficult to say, whereas meaningless things are easy to say.

His mother totally agrees, and muses how it would be nice for him to marry the girl he loves if he’d just get past the “good mornings” and weather talk. A subsequent scene with the teacher and the sister waiting for the train thus has elements of suspense, causing us to wonder if he can get past talking about the weather and clouds.

Good Morning certainly works as a tightly constructed comedy, but it contains deeper levels of enjoyment. The importance of our automatic communication has never been illuminated as well, yet the film also serves as a social statement about Japan’s entry into the modern world. Traditional ways are reflected with the older characters while the children are eager to adopt modern conveniences, leaving the parents to struggle with the choice of remaining with the old ways or seeing if they can adopt the modern conveniences without losing their way. In hindsight we already know the road that Japan will take, but it’s interesting to see how Ozu uses the “retired” man to ease the transition.

Most of all, it’s simply fun to watch Ozu’s charming and joyful comedy, comparable in spirit to Fellini’s Amarcord with its love of character, humor, and relentless fart jokes. Based on his 1932 silent comedy I Was Born, But… and not considered Ozu’s greatest film, Good Morning serves well as an introduction to the Japanese master’s ouvre and is thankfully available on DVD.

Good.Morning.1959.BluRay.576p.x264.AAC-stairs.mkv

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https://nitro.download/view/09714DAB004E2A9/Good.Morning.1959.BluRay.576p.x264.AAC-stairs.mkv

Language(s):Japanese
Subtitles:English

The post Yasujiro Ozu – Ohayô aka Good Morning (1959) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Quote:
An independent-minded 28-year old woman living in cosmopolitan, postwar Tokyo may seem immune from the societal pressures of marriage, but in Noriko’s (Setsuko Hara) environment, it is a perennially surfacing, unavoidable topic. Her father, Shukichi (Ichirô Sugai), and mother, Shige (Chieko Higashiyama), are unable to retire to her uncle’s house in the provincial town of Yamato until their duty to marry off Noriko to a worthy suitor has been fulfilled. Her visits with school friends invariably break down into playful arguments between the married and unmarried women. Even her office director offers to introduce her to a 40-year old business acquaintance, providing her photographs of the obscured prospective suitor to take home to show her family. Upon learning of Noriko’s suitor, her brother Koichi (Chishu Ryu) takes it upon himself to investigate the businessman’s suitability (as the businessman similarly dispatches a detective to inquire about Noriko), and encourages their marriage, despite the age difference. Meanwhile, Koichi’s recently widowed friend and colleague, Kenkichi Yabe (Ryudan Nimoto) has been transferred to an agricultural province. During Noriko’s farewell visit to the Yabe family, Kenkichi’s mother (Haruko Sugimura) confesses her hope for her son to marry Noriko, an offer that she impulsively accepts. However, her family is less receptive to the idea, believing that Kenkichi’s modest income and young child would lead their beloved Noriko to a life of hardship.

Yasujiro Ozu’s signature low angle camera strikes a delicate, harmonious balance in Early Summer, and echoes the dichotomy of contemporary Japan: tradition versus modernization, selfishness versus altruism, respect for elders versus independence. Compassionate and characteristically reserved, Ozu chronicles the disintegration of the traditional extended family as an accepted process of life, and the film evolves with a sense of appropriate inevitability. The contrast between the elders, usually contemplative and at leisure, and the younger generations – the overworked Koichi and the impatient children (with literal one track minds) – reflect the various stages of life. Episodically, the opening images of the beach and caged birds are reflected throughout the film, providing a sense of continuity to the ritual of existence. In the end, it is the words of the usually reticent Tamura that seems to provide the key for a successful life: “We shouldn’t want too much.” It is a thought that is similarly shared by master Ozu in the filming of Early Spring – a spare, beautifully realized story of profound, yet fundamentally human emotions.

2.13GB | 2h 04mn | 768×576 | mkv

https://nitro.download/view/28054F53EC7F7AC/Yasujiro_Ozu_-_(1951)_Early_Summer.mkv

Language:Japanese
Subtitles:English

The post Yasujiro Ozu – Bakushû AKA Early Summer (1951) first appeared on Cinema of the World.