Though it opens in classic Yasujirô Ozu style: Slightly detached middle-aged single father; Younger daughter in need of a husband; Older daughter in need of a better husband; this film rapidly descends into ever darker corners of family melodrama. Baldly stated, Ozu’s plot elements might well have shown up in a late ‘50s/TechniColored Hollywood tear-jerker: unwed pregnancy; the reappearance of a mother after twenty years; excessive drinking & gambling (sake in place of Scotch/Mah Jongg instead of poker); hunting up cash for an abortion; disrespectful youth; suicide; deathbed contrition. (Douglas Sirk or Mark Robson could have done it up Hollywood style.) But in spite of all the heightened action, this is still very much a Yasujirô Ozu film, with his subtle restraint in all departments, played out in his signature style of unforced inevitability. Fascinating, heartbreaking, utterly his own. Ozu films change like the proverbial river once you put a foot in. But here, it’s Big Foot, and with a proportionate change in the current’s flow.
ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: Criterion has apparently leased their LATE OZU Series from Shôchiku Japan Home Video unit. The color films have all come up well, but some of the b&w titles, though in very clean prints, seem to have been processed with a compressed grey scale, slightly dulling Ozu’s impeccable compositions.
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