Cinema
Japanese fan
Peter Ackroyd
Tokyo Story ('U', Gate, Notting Hill)
Tt ,is difficult to know if this film, now lbeing shot again after an interval of some years, will still manage to retain the atten- tion of an audience; the techniques which western directors use to engage the interest and enthusiasm of the public — the cameras moving quickly so that they seem to participate in the action, the swift pace of editing, the direct attempt to elicit sym- pathy or anger — are now so familiar that they are sometimes regarded as indispen- sable. We are used to becoming 'involved' in a film, where in Tokyo Story we remain very much on the outside. The camera does not move but remains fixed in the same position for each scene, so the effect on an audience is similar to that of looking at a painting. There is no attempt to accelerate the narrative, or to introduce comic or heroic 'points', and the dialogue itself is as brief as it is restrained. and although such devices tend to slow down the pace of the film, such slowness is important; the film acquires solidity as a result, and gradually
a pattern of human relationships is established.
An old Japanese couple who live in the country are visiting Tokyo for the first time in order to see their children and grand- children. They are bewildered by the city (the film was made in 1953), and their sense of displacement is compounded by the fact that the children find them a nuisance and a burden; they really have no time for them, and dispatch them to an inexpensive health 'spa'. But the couple have over the years come to rely upon and support each other, and now they are as stolid and as patient as two old turtles. They do not complain about the behaviour of their family, except to each other, but they return to their village as quickly as possible. Here the old woman dies, a few days later, and the hus- band is left to tend his garden. That is all, It is in some ways a poignant and moving film, although I am not sure that those are the qualities which the director, Yasujiro Ozu, wished us to find in it. It is perhaps more in the nature of a fable, as clear and as dispassionate as a cautionary tale.
Of course this is an acquired taste — or, rather, our own expectations in the cinema depend so much on grandiose or immediate effects that we need to re-acquire the ability to watch something of this kind. The ap- parent restraint of the Japanese themselves in ordinary social behaviour becomes one aspect of the film itself, and although the acting may seem slightly wooden on occa- sions that is also part of the design. It would not be true to say that these actors are 'im- passive' but rather that the expression of human feeling is expressed within a more formal and concentrated range: their gestures are more economical, and even the register of their voices seems narrower than in western performance. Certainly it would be a mistake to think of the director as somehow attempting to capture or express some 'universal' statement of feeling: that is a sentimental illusion which normally only American directors permit themselves.
I suspect, for example, that much of the effect of the film has to do with the social and religious system from which it derives; and of this we know so little that some of the key phrases — 'Be a good son while your parents are still alive', for example sound merely platitudinous in translation. Part of the strength of the film must also be lost in the sub-titles. It seems that Ozu's scripts are now studied in Japanese schools, and although the translation gave only the framework of the dialogue it was clear that it had the same kind of simplicity and economy which the film itself exemplifies.
Tokyo Story, despite these problems of cultural reference, still has a cumulative and even hypnotic — power, pre-eminently because the director has a firm central con- ception which he has applied throughout. There are no redundant or distracting scenes, and everything has been constructed with such deliberation that the themes of the film — youth and age, gratitude and in- gratitude — have themselves a kind of sym- metry. The impression is of a solid edifice being put together brick by brick.
All of the critics have described the 'greatness' of the film; it is difficult to know what this means but, on the principle that one knows it when one sees it, I doubt that Tokyo Story is quite of that pre- eminent quality. It offers, instead, a careful and exact appreciation of human behaviour. It is accessible to a western au- dience not because feelings are somehow 'the same' all over the world (which is most unlikely), but because such a lucid and coherent film carries its own conviction.
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