DVD of the Week: Floating Weeds

Yasujiro Ozu’s 1959 film “Floating Weeds,” which I discuss in this clip, is a drama about the romantic entanglements of members of an itinerant theatrical troupe with residents of a small seaside town, and offers a bright and flamboyant palette of cinematic color to match the emotional intensity of the action. Ozu is often considered to be a director of sober restraint; in fact, sober restraint is his main subject, and the subject of his critique. If he tones down the emotional temperature of his characters’ outward expression and keeps his image-making within a narrow spectrum of visual variety, it’s to heighten the power and scope of nuance. The changes of shots in Ozu are as audacious and jolting as those in, say, the films of Nicholas Ray, and the struggle for personal expression and freedom—inner and outer—in a convention-bound, tradition-burdened society is Ozu’s main subject, as it is for Ray. In this film, Ozu lets fly with more flagrant furies than usual. In his quiet (and, here, a little less quiet) way, he was an angry Expressionist, a permanent exile, who didn’t need to show his turmoil in a tumultuous way in order to capture and convey turmoil even wilder than that of some overtly agitated filmmakers.