Tokyo Story

 

Tokyo Story, the 1953 Japanese movie  directed by Yushihiro Ozu is considered to be one of the greatest movies ever made.

Tokyo Story is about a simple journey. A journey that  the aged parents make from the distant village to visit  their children who have settled down  in Tokyo. They spend a few days in Tokyo with their children and return back to their village.

Soon after their return, the mother dies – may be due to travel fatigue. The  family assembles for her funeral. And once the funeral ceremonies are over, they all return , one by one, back  to their day to day  lives.

That’s it.

That is  not even a story. Just a chain of events happening  over a period of few days in a family. That’s it.  A movie of just over two hours running time.

 What makes it a great work of art?

 Not many would have heard about Yushihiro Ozu the Japanese director. But after watching  this movie, you are sure to  feel that the movie’s writer - director Ozu had all along known you very intimately. A movie about a few people from a distant Japan from the mid 20^th century resonates with emotions that are  very universal. 

 Before getting more into the intricacies of the characters , or the universality of the theme , let us see how Ozu communicates  with his viewers.

 The camera in this movie is an abandoned piece of equipment- on the floor- in a corner, like a piece of forgotten furniture. As if to take extreme care lest any slight movement of the camera should  disturb the  equilibrium of the universe. 

In a movie that runs more than two hours, the camera never moves except twice- for  a few seconds. 

And the director presents the  entire movie effortlessly,   like  a neighbour appearing at your stationary window  frame , makes some random  remarks about mundane everyday happenings...and walks away. 

The characters in Tokyo Story appear as if they are talking from the screen directly addressing the viewers - an  attempt probably  to make the viewer feel as if she is sitting "inside" the scene, as one of the characters. And the characters of the movie converse with each other through the viewer as the medium.

Another feature of Ozu are his "punctuation sequences". As and when he intends a scene transition, the camera goes outdoors capturing a string of  seemingly unrelated shots. Apart from facilitating a seamless transition, these visuals add an element of cinematic magic that doubles up as the contextual thread running all along the movie. 

Tokyo Story, the movie can be approached from multiple vantage points of reference. And each attempt could offer a different reading of the movie. 

For a reference of analysis, here we take the sequence where the parents are waiting at Tokyo railway  station for their return journey. 

It can be noticed that even though we see trains all over the movie, we never see the parents traveling in one. 

At the Tokyo railway station, as the parents rise to board the train,  we see only the clock, instead of the train itself. 

And the train reference elsewhere is invariably bound to the concept of time. As in the scene where the grandmother talks to the little kid about what he wants to become once he grows up:

 

And in the final scenes, when we finally get to see the actual  train journey , the movie  explodes with a big bang and reveals its transcendental dimension:

Noriko comforts  Kyoko and grooms her to accept life with all its fallacies and disappointments. And later Noriko herself gets her life lesson from the father who teaches her to accept the inevitability of life and death. 

And presents  her the  watch from the previous generation. 

 

Just as the parents viewed the city of Tokyo from up the staircases, Kyoto, from a room full of children  watches the train pass below. In which Noriko carries the watch forward.  

And the boat continues its journey. 

With the solid structure occupying almost half  the screen as a recurring motif, the father watches the ephemeral flow nonchalantly.