With ‘Ozu 120,’ Film Forum Offers a Three-Week Window Into the Great Japanese Director’s World

Is there another movie director who is as uniformly beloved as Yasujirō Ozu (1903-63)? Ozu’s films touch upon core human truths with rare deftness and humility, with an understanding that we are shaped as much through life’s interstices as by its signal events. Ozu, the film critic Roger Ebert wrote, was “not only a great director but a great teacher, and after you know his films, a friend.”This raises the question: What director would you want as a friend? Alfred Hitchcock or Quentin Tarantino? Maybe. Forget Billy Wilder: a little cynicism goes a long way. It would be hard to get a word in edgewise with Preston Sturges. Leni Riefenstahl? Um, no. Should one be in a mood to be condescended to, Chantal Akerman. You’d invariably have to pick up the bill for Orson Welles. Only when we get to René Clair, François Truffaut, and, yes, Ozu does this parlor game begin to make sense. The Portuguese director Pedro Costa pegged Ozu’s pictures as “documentaries about mankind,” which is, on the face of it, a counterintuitive analogy. What kind of naturalism can arise from a film as patently orchestrated as “Late Spring” (1949)? Meticulous artifice can illuminate currents of emotion and thought with uncanny directness. How many times have we looked at a portrait by John Singer Sargent only to find ourselves communing directly with its sitter?Film Forum, in conjunction with the Japan Foundation and Janus Films, is mounting “Ozu 120,” a three-week retrospective of the entirety of the director’s corpus in recognition of the anniversary of his birth. The pictures include 13 silents with live piano accompaniment; box office successes like “Brothers and Sisters of the Toda Family” (1940) and “There Was a Father” (1942); a smattering of short films, including a 10-minute fragment of the otherwise lost “I Graduated But . . .” (1929); and, of course, that sublime meditation on family, duty, and the march of time, “Tokyo Story” (1953).Setsuko Hara and Chishū Ryū in ‘Tokyo Story.’ Via Film ForumThe latter was the first Ozu picture to gain traction among cinephiles outside of the director’s home country. “Tokyo Story” benefited from the international success of “Rashomon” (1950) and a concomitant interest in Japanese cinema. Ozu was, though, very different in temperament from Akira Kurosawa. The influence of Western cinema was pivotal and pronounced for Kurosawa, while Ozu has often been seen as truly or, to some lights anyway, forbiddingly Japanese. Perhaps the time it took for the world to acknowledge Ozu can be likened to the tracing of time in his stories. In terms of rhythm, editing, and composition, Ozu is utterly individual, his vision being so particular that any attempt to mimic it would result in either parody or plagiarism. Movie-goers acclimated to the conventions of mainstream entertainment might be put off by the limited formal means by which Ozu constructs his scenes. Conversations between characters are shot head-on, with each person addressing the camera directly. The vantage point is famously low to the ground. Conversations are clipped, but no less revealing for what is left unsaid. Ozu’s movies progress with all the deliberation of a poet who has finally discovered the precise moment at which to pause.“Tokyo Story” is the place for the uninitiated to enter Ozu’s filmography. “Good Morning” (1959) is a minor treat, while “The Flavor of Green Tea Over Rice” (1952) is burdened by a romantic subplot regarding a regal woman and a goofy guy — but its primary tale of marital woe has considerable bite. Then there’s “Late Spring,” in which one of the great beauties of international cinema, Setsuko Hara, stars as an unmarried woman whose unbending devotion to her father is told with gravitas and grace. For more of where that came from, Film Forum is the place to be — that is to say, Ozu’s place.

With ‘Ozu 120,’ Film Forum Offers a Three-Week Window Into the Great Japanese Director’s World

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