Bakushu (Ozu, Yasujiro, 1951)
Chishu Ryu, Setsuko Hara, Chikage Awashima
In postwar Tokyo, this household is loving and serene: older parents, their 28-year-old daughter Noriko, their married son, his devoted wife, and two rascally sons. Their only discontent is Noriko's lack of a husband. Society is changing: she works, she has women friends who tease and argue, her brother sees her independence as impudence, she sees it as normal. When her boss suggests that she marry a 40-year-old bachelor who is his friend, all the members of her family press her to accept. Without seeking their advice, and to their chagrin, Noriko determines her own course of action.
There’s little about Ozu’s films that’s ‘cinematic’. He doesn’t use any special effects. He rarely moves the camera, in any sense of the word ‘move’. There’s nothing special about his lighting, use of sound, production design, makeup, and so on. Which only leaves the script, the direction, the acting, the editing (at least that’s cinematic, if inchoate). Not to mention more mysterious over-arching characteristics like ‘narrative, ‘poetry’, and even ‘ideology’.
This, together with Banshun (1949) and Tokyo Story (1953), is one of the three films of the ‘Noriko trilogy’. In each of them Setsuko Hara portrays a young woman named Noriko, though the three Norikos are distinct, unrelated characters, linked primarily by their status as single women in postwar Japan.
Garry Gillard | New: 3 March, 2017 | Now: 9 September, 2018