Tôkyô Monogatari (1953) Tokyo Story (Dual-audio Remaster + DVD Extras)

Ozu's most famous film, and certainly one of his masterpieces, is Tokyo Story. In it an elderly couple are taken to visit their grown-up children in Tokyo. Too busy to entertain them, the children pack them off to a noisy resort. Returning to Tokyo, the old woman visits the widow of another son, who treats her better, while the old man gets drunk with some old companions. They seem to realise they are a burden, and simply try to smooth things over as best they can. By now the children have, albeit guiltily, given up on them; even when their mother is taken ill and dies, they rush back to Tokyo after attending the funeral. A simple proverb expresses their failure: "Be kind to your parents while they are alive. Filial piety cannot reach beyond the grave." The last sequence is of the old man alone in his seaside home, followed by an outside shot of the rooftops of the town and a boat passing by on the water. Life goes on.

With Audio commentary by Ozu film scholar David Desser.


The film condemns no one and its sense of inevitability carries with it only a certain resigned sadness. "Isn't life disappointing," someone says at one point. Yet the simple observations are so acute that you feel that no other film could express its subject matter much better.


Ozu shoots his story with as little movement of the camera as possible. We view scenes almost always from the floor, lower than the eye level of a seated character. He insisted that no actor was to dominate a scene. The balance of every scene had to be perfect. Chishu Ryu, who often played the father in Ozu's films about family life, once had to complete two dozen takes devoted to raising a tea cup.


Tokyo Story was followed by eight other films, all of them as masterful, and a group named after the seasons, including Early Spring and An Autumn Afternoon. Each was about the problems of ordinary family life. While their conservative nature made younger more polemical Japanese directors, such as Imamura and Oshima, impatient, their universality has come to be recognised the world over. Ozu was the most Japanese of film-makers, but his work can still cross most cultural barriers.





The film and the two extras will all fit on one single-sided DVD.
Massive thanks to CerealRipper for the two DVD9s.