Eclipsed by Kurosawa

The quiet wit of Yasujiro Ozu is mistaken as too provincial

The great director Yasujiro Ozu was often described as the “most Japanese” of the major filmmakers from his country. This was a way of saying that Ozu’s quiet stories about family life were too provincial and unfashionable for Western audiences —especially when set beside the kinetic action films of Akira Kurosawa, who gained an enormous international following in the 1950s. But it wasn’t just the content of Ozu’s movies that was understated. His shooting style was frugal, almost as if he were a Buddhist monk denying himself the more lavish pleasures of life (in this case, refusing to use the many tools at a filmmaker’s disposal). His camera rarely moved; it stayed in a static position, coolly recording the movements and conversations of people. To go from one shot to the next, he invariably used a simple cut, never employing more poetic techniques like the dissolve or the slow fade-out.

And yet, despite this minimalism of form and content, his best films have a freshness about them, because they are extraordinarily perceptive about the minutiae of people’s lives.

Personally speaking, Ozu’s cinema fascinates me for its glimpses into a taciturn culture very different from the boisterous north Indian one I grew up in. In his most famous film Tokyo Story, an elderly couple travel to the big city to visit their children and realise that they are a burden on the younger generation, who are busy leading their own lives. Compare this film to the early 1980s’ Hindi movie Avatar, which dealt with a similar subject, and you find a difference not just of cinematic adeptness but of cultural assumptions. In Avatar, the prevailing idiom is that of melodrama. As in most mainstream Hindi films (which, after all, reflect an emotionally demonstrative culture), the emphasis is on heightening the viewer’s response to a dramatic situation. Tokyo Story, on the other hand, is very low key — the one time when the old father even complains mildly about his children’s neglect is at the fag end of a heavy drinking session, when he isn’t in control of his senses. That apart, the characteristic Japanese restraint — even at times of great stress — is on view throughout.

Or take Ozu’s lovely 1951 movie Early Summer, about a family worrying that their daughter is past the marriageable age, and then reluctantly coming to terms with her independent choice of husband. Exactly the same subject handled by a commercial Hindi film would be full of spectacular dramatic moments — slaps, sobbing sessions, stentorian voices threatening disinheritance — with a thunder-clap or three on the soundtrack. In Early Summer, the surface is calm, though we sense the undercurrents of tension throughout.

However, one of my favourite Ozu films, Good Morning, finds an interesting way to comment on the reticence of Japanese society. It does this by using the perspective of children, who have not yet been conditioned in social niceties: the story — about two little boys demanding that their parents buy a television set so they can watch sumo matches — allows Ozu to show the natural childlike propensity for bluntness, which contrasts with the mannered (sometimes, vacuous) ways of the adults.

In fact, it might be said that the role of the disruptive children in this film is similar to the role of television, which is seen as an undesirable Western product that will bring the crassness of American popular culture into Japanese houses. There are many other cues to globalisation too — with gentle, perceptive wit, Good Morning depicts the fears of people dealing with change. It’s ironic that “the most Japanese director” could make such a fine, light-hearted movie about his country cautiously letting the world in through its doors!

[Jai Arjun Singh is a Delhi-based freelance writer]