TOKYO STORY Movie Review

Tokyo Monogatari
Their First Trip to Tokyo

An aging couple (Chieko Higashiyama and Chishu Ryu) decides to make the trip from their small town to Tokyo to visit their busy children, but the trip is strenuous and—in many ways—disappointing. On their journey home one of the parents becomes ill and dies, and the children and surviving parent must come to terms with the experience. Yasujiro Ozu had made over 40 movies by the time he filmed Tokyo Story (a.k.a. Their First Trip to Tokyo) in 1953.Though a few Ozu films were seen in the United States in the 1950s and 1960s, Tokyo Story never actually received American release until 1972, when it showed up at Daniel Talbot's invaluable New Yorker Theatre. The impact for those of us who discovered the picture then was immeasurable; it was as if film history—as some of us had come to understand it—had to be rewritten. Ozu had refined a kind of storytelling that was similar from film to film. These “home dramas,” as they have been called, reflect a simple but shockingly profound philosophy, which—if it could be boiled down to “high concept”—might be described as a character's acceptance of the ultimate sadness of life. In Ozu, this is the opposite of defeat. In fact, the moment of epiphany in Tokyo Story, in which a loving daughter-in-law (the sublime Setsuko Hara) is asked tearfully if life is disappointing and states her certain answer with a magnificent smile, is as surprisingly reassuring a vision as any work of 20th-century art has offered us. Tokyo Story is one of the greatest films of all time. Seeing it once a year is reason enough to own a VCR.

NEXT STOP … Late Spring, Floating Weeds, An Autumn Afternoon

1953 134m/B JP Chishu Ryu, Chieko Higashiyama, So Yamamura, Haruko Sugimura, Setsuko Hara; D: Yasujiro Ozu; W: Yasujiro Ozu; C: Yushun Atsuta; M: Kojun Saito. VHS, NYF, FCT