With a patience befitting the older couple at its center, director Yasujiro Ozu presents Japan at a crossroads in Tokyo Story. And fittingly for the director of the likes of I Was Born, but…, Late Spring, and Floating Weeds, he does so through the lens of a family. The film follows retirees Shukichi and Tomi Hirayama (Chishu Ryu and Chieko Higashiyama) as they travel from their modest home in western Japan to visit their various adult children in Tokyo. They find not only a bustling, modern city, but busy, distracted offspring—polite enough, yet clearly inconvenienced by the appearance of parents they haven’t seen in years. Shukichi and Tomi simply smile and try not to make too much fuss, which is also a way of describing Ozu’s unobtrusive camera. (I think I caught it moving only once.) And so the considerable dynamics at play must vibrate ever so softly beneath the surface, as we learn—from gestures, asides, and quick anecdotes—what this family has been through over the decades. Tokyo Story is a work of considerable restraint. And all the more affecting for it.
(2/20/2024)
