An early silent feature from Yasujiro Ozu, A Story of Floating Weeds follows a traveling troupe of entertainers who cause all sorts of offstage melodrama while performing in a village. Largely this is because the troupe’s leader, Kihachi (Takeshi Sakamoto), spends time visiting a former lover (Chōko Iida), with whom he had a son (Hideo Mitsui) years before. When Kihachi’s current lover and fellow performer (Rieko Yagumo) discovers this, she enacts a vindictive plot that makes no distinction between the “guilty” and the innocent. Although lightened by comic bits—Tomio Aoki, also good in Ozu’s I Was Born, but… a few years earlier, elicits laughs as the youngest member of the troupe—this is a painful story, even punctuated by occasional physical abuse. Ozu’s mostly fixed camera observes all of this from a carefully composed distance, making the occasional medium shots, in which the characters face the camera, feel shocking. (Ozu would revisit this story with 1959’s Floating Weeds, where the compositions and use of color exude even more emotion and sophistication.)
(7/10/2025)
