Yasujiro Ozu’s poised images convey a bitterly ironic, scathingly radical rejection of Japanese codes of self-restraint and silence. He’s a supremely political filmmaker, and in “Good Morning” (which I discuss in this clip), his 1959 remake of his 1932 comedy “I Was Born, But…,” Ozu makes silence his very subject. In warm and humorous scenes, it emerges as the abyss of the generation gap; but here, Ozu stands his own ironic inversions on their head. If he repudiates the elders’ self-stifling manners, he also worries about the uninhibited, unconstrained impudence of young people who are more influenced by mass media and Western culture than by family and tradition. All of his characters are out of synch, and he has no solution for meshing them, offers no answer to the question of what Japan is to become. His resigned wisdom is that there’s no choice but to trust the power of time—because, as seen in many of his earlier films, he knew well that the formalities of bygone ages led to militaristic ruin.
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Goings On
What we’re watching, listening to, and doing this week, online, in N.Y.C., and beyond. Paid subscribers also receive book picks.
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