Admittedly, this is the first film I've seen of Ozu, but I definitely get a sense that this wasn't a great place to start. It was pretty good but I could almost feel Ozu's slower, more contemplative style really straining to come out.
It's a melodrama about a traveling actor and his son, who thinks he (the actor) is his (the son's) uncle. When "Uncle" comes to visit with his struggling acting troupe, the 20-year-old son falls in love with one of the actresses under the uncle, which causes a lot of drama as actors are very low class in the Japanese society of the time and the father left his son specifically to keep him away from such a low-class situation (at least that's what he says... his motivations may be a bit different).
The key thing at work in this film is definitely craft. Ozu obviously has a very specific, strong craft to the way he organizes things. Yet still this film is rather straining against it's cuts, so to speak, and even if I haven't seen it, I'd imagine Ozu's own remake "Floating Weeds" is better as it's probably more contemplative and presents the dialog-rich story in sound.
I'm not saying this is a bad film in any rate, I'm just saying that I can tell from watching it that Ozu can do better.
--PolarisDiB
It's a melodrama about a traveling actor and his son, who thinks he (the actor) is his (the son's) uncle. When "Uncle" comes to visit with his struggling acting troupe, the 20-year-old son falls in love with one of the actresses under the uncle, which causes a lot of drama as actors are very low class in the Japanese society of the time and the father left his son specifically to keep him away from such a low-class situation (at least that's what he says... his motivations may be a bit different).
The key thing at work in this film is definitely craft. Ozu obviously has a very specific, strong craft to the way he organizes things. Yet still this film is rather straining against it's cuts, so to speak, and even if I haven't seen it, I'd imagine Ozu's own remake "Floating Weeds" is better as it's probably more contemplative and presents the dialog-rich story in sound.
I'm not saying this is a bad film in any rate, I'm just saying that I can tell from watching it that Ozu can do better.
--PolarisDiB