Tokyo Story: "You'll be lonely here, by yourself." "I'll get used to it."

    I just finished Ozu's 'Tokyo Story' and, along with his other great film, 'Floating Weeds', is just the second of his works I have seen. It's another great, nostalgic, touching masterpiece.

    Set about a decade after the war, 'Tokyo Story' tells of an elderly couple who travel from their rural Japanese village to visit their grown children in Tokyo. At varying points in the story, they will stay with their eldest doctor son and their hairdresser daughter. Another son comes to visit with them. As does a daughter-in-law, who can't seem to move on from her dead husband-- the elderly couple's son. The children, caught up with their jobs and the busy movement of the city, can't ever seem to make enough time for the parents. At one point the son and daughter send them to a nice hotel by the sea, but it's a place for younger people really. None of the grown children are ever mean or even rude, really, but are a bit inconvenienced by the older folk and try to do their best with them.

    The daughter-in-law will show them the most kindness. She simultaneously suggests a deep personal loneliness as well as real warmth for her surrogate parents, more than the other children seem capable of. Even by the end of the story, after a great tragedy, the father admits as much to her.
 
    What I appreciated so much about 'Tokyo Story', as I did with 'Floating Weeds', was how bereft of artificial melodrama the film was. There are no forced scenes of yelling, or contrived conflicts designed to manipulate tears from the viewer. The parents visit, the children don't really have time, and that's pretty much the plot. The simplicity of the story lends an authentic feel to the movie. Too often during 'Tokyo Story', it's easy to reflect on your own relationships with your family, maybe get a little nostalgic for the memories you had as a child and how they have slipped away down the path of time, and had to. That's just life.

    As I said, I have only seen two of Ozu's movies, but they are clearly of a type. 'Floating Weeds', in truly beautiful technicolor, told the story of an acting troupe visiting a sleepy Japanese fishing village and the hidden familial connection of an actor to one of the locals. Both films feature a camera that never pans, families in a subdued turmoil, a deliberate lack of overt emoting (from the actors and the dialogue), and a slight, but pervasive sense of melancholy derived from a longing for memories and lost loved ones. They're also both masterpieces that everyone should see.