ovie lovers are certainly in luck this month. In addition to the release of the Apu trilogy (for which, see Short Takes), this film—ranked the fifth greatest ever made in the prestigious 2002 Sight & Sound international Critics’ Top Ten Poll (just for the record, Citizen Kane, Vertigo, La Règle de jeu, The Godfather, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Battleship Potemkin, Sunrise, 8 1/2, and Singin’ In the Rain were the others, in that order)—has been released in a sterling transfer by Criterion.
      Though the film and its director, Yasujiro Ozu, may be obscure to those of you who aren’t fans of Japanese cinema, trust me when I tell you that it and he belong among the eminent company they keep on Sight & Sound’s list, and for much the same reason that Ray and Pather Panchali belong in that same company. Although Ozu’s spare, understated approach to filmmaking is far removed from that of Ray’s, his subject matter is not. Tokyo Story is also a film that focuses a clear dispassionate eye on a family coping with disappointment and death. As in Ray’s film, there is a wryness to the presentation, an acceptance of the way human beings are and the lot they are heirs to, entirely removed from the artifice, sentimentality, and moralizing of Hollywood melodrama.
      Ozu is often regarded as the most Japanese of Japanese directors because of the subtlety and uncompromising concision of his style. His thirty-five-year filmmaking career can be seen as a long deliberate process of paring away excesses, of purification. By the time of Tokyo Story, he had discarded as nonessential many of the things that we think of as fundamentally cinematic: dolly or pan-like camera movements, extreme close-ups, cuts or dissolves timed to sound or action. Generally, his camera gazes at the world from a fixed position three feet off the ground—from what is equivalent to the sitting position of a person in a Japanese home, rather like another observer in the room.
      As with his technique (which he himself compared to tofu, because, as his biographer Donald Richie reports, “he could not handle the chops and cutlets of other directors”), his subject matter—the dissolution of the Japanese middle-class family, which intensified with the Westernization of Japan after the War—remained simple. So did his situations (“plot” is too strong a word for his story structures), which belong to a genre called “shomin-geki,” sardonic melodramas centering on the sometimes humorous and sometimes acrimonious relations among parents and siblings. Ozu was such an essentialist that he told the same stories over and over again, often using the same performers, not so much for their skills at impersonating fictitious characters but for who he felt they themselves were as human beings.
      Though he started off in the late 1920s as a satirist à la Ernst Lubitsch, by the time of Tokyo Story Ozu approached the shomin-geki with a resigned sadness. And it is that sadness and resignation that permeates this story of two unhappy journeys between places and generations—elderly parents paying a visit to their grown children in Tokyo, and the children returning home when one of the parents dies. On the first occasion, we glimpse the indifference and vague disappointment behind the ritual respect that all but one of the children show their parents (and that the parents show their children and, to a tiny unspoken extent, each other), and on the second, we see the selfishness, loneliness, and regret behind the ritual grief.
      If at first you are put off by the seeming perfunctory quality of Ozu’s transitions—simple, unpretty shots of buildings or of pedestrians—the plainness of his editing, with very little intercutting within scenes, or the way he seems to skim past or simply ignore what may seem like conventionally important “plot points,” you need to step back, readjust your expectations, and let the film work on you on its own terms. If you are patient enough to do this, you will find that Ozu is so exquisitely and steadfastly focused on the flawed humanity of his characters that this film—so slight in its structure, so understated in its means, so spare in action—achieves the pathos of tragedy.
      “In every Ozu film,” Richie has written, “the whole world exists in one family. The ends of the earth are no more distant than outside the house.” In its characteristically modest way, Tokyo Story takes us to the ends of the earth, to the verge of the darkness just beyond the lights. Jonathan Valin