#131
Post
by My Man Godfrey » Sun Jun 24, 2007 6:05 pm
I write this very cautiously (and, of course, I'm happy to be set straight), but is it possible that some of these movies are a little overrated?
I didn't have any "preconceptions about Ozu" going into this set -- just an excitement about finally sitting down with the films of a director I hadn't spent much time with. In other words, I don't think my reaction can be chalked up to frustrated expectations.
The films in this set feel so reiterative to me: reiterative of one another and reiterative within themselves; every point, every idea, is laid out so unambiguously, at such length, and underlined again and again.
Obviously, this is a matter of taste to some extent. I watched "Equinox Flower" w/some of my "normal" friends (i.e., people who aren't obsessive film buffs, and don't have any particular stake in being into Yasujiro Ozu); they all found it punishingly dull, largely because the characters seem to be explicitly articulating absolutely everything; there's so little work for the viewer to do here, so little subtext.
The Criterion essay remarks very vaguely on Ozu's genius in placing a red teakettle in the corner of the frame in a couple of scenes. Maybe, then, the problem is not that the film's subtext is too thin for me; maybe the problem is that the puzzles of the movie -- what does the red teakettle symbolize, and what does it have to do with this endless, prosaic dialogue? -- are too complex for me. I don't understand why the presence of a red teakettle -- even one that balances the colors in the frame in a lovely way -- would turn a tedious scene into a masterful one.
On the other hand, I grasp that the bottle of orange soda on the dinner table is a subtle nod to cultural and generational shifts in Japan, the intrusion, perhaps, of western culture -- but a meaningful bottle of soda is not, in itself, enough to make a movie a classic. Is it?
Can somebody explain to me -- without being condescending, or sneering at my obtuseness (and if I seem like I'm sneering, please trust that the medium is garbling my tone; I'm not trying to dismiss Ozu or insult his fans, whose passion is evident all over this site) -- why these movies are so great? Here are a few questions I have:
1) Can these movies be enjoyable in 2007 to people who don't take a special pleasure in poring over the fabric of Japanese culture at a very specific historical moment?
To clarify what I mean: Rashomon and Ikiru are two of my favorite movies. Sansho the Bailiff as well. While these films comment in any number of ways on Japanese culture, the storytelling is ultimately universal. While Ikiru is a "slow" movie -- in places, maybe, too slow -- it's so emotionally resonant. Until some point in the future when we become immortal, any film that considers the questions Ikiru's looking at will be relevant. In a sense, Ikiru can't ever be dated, because the questions it's dealing with are so fundamental.
In the case of these Ozu films, though, it feels like there's a point when I "get" the movie -- when I feel like I appreciate the contrasts the film is trying to draw, the themes the picture's trying to elucidate -- and then the movie goes on for another hour. (It's similiar to the impatience I felt while watching Adaptation: long after I got the clever joke, and knew exactly where the movie was going, I had to sit by and watch as the movie continued the joke and went exactly where I'd suspected it was going: it's a po-mo movie about a hack screenwriter that becomes, itself, a hack Hollywood movie! Compare that to Eternal Sunshine, where the final scenes are full of revelations.)
2) Why does nobody comment on Ozu's conservatism as a filmmaker? Does nobody else find this stifling?
The first time I saw an Ozu film (years ago), I experienced moments of impatience, but on the whole I found the film enjoyable because it was immersing me in something new. Not just the time and place that the film was portraying -- the costumes and sets, the customs that the film neutrally observed -- but the mise-en-scene, the careful construction of the shots and scenes, the lovely establishing shots . . . and the quiet feeling of the movie as a whole.
Watching the films in this set, I'm not experiencing that same pleasure, because there's no sense of discovery. These movies look like they were all filmed on the same sets. Ozu uses the same camera set-up, the same lens, in every shot. The actors are often the same from film to film (not a problem in itself, of course; look at my avatar), and the characters they're playing feel very similar. The titles -- Early Spring, Late Spring, the End of Summer, Tokyo Story, Tokyo Twilight, etc. It even seems like these scores are being recycled in these movies -- the weirdly inappropriate elevator music that hums in the background of many of the most dramatic scenes.
In other words, my admiration for the careful composition of the shots fades a little when I see that Ozu was making little variations on the same film for decades on end. And that doesn't even take into account the fact that some of his films were explicitly remakes of his earlier pictures! (Not to return too often to a comparison that may be inappropriate in many ways . . . but consider how different, and yet how accomplished, Ikiru, Ran, Rashomon, and Yojimbo are. And to the Ozu-philes who will respond that Kurosawa, in his samurai films, was doing much was Ozu does in this set -- endlessly refining a style, and a theme -- I'll say that Kurosawa's more straight-ahead samurai epics, while enjoyable, are, for me, his least interesting films. I do not include, in this category, movies like Throne of Blood and, of course, Rashomon, which after all is more of a courtroom drama than a samurai picture.)
(One of the reasons I'm using Kurosawa as a point of reference, by the way, is so that my questions won't be waved away on the grounds that I "don't appreciate Japanese cinema." From Toho to Ghibli to Beat Takeshi to Takashi Miike, I love Japanese cinema -- although some of the films I've seen in the "salaryman" genre haven't much impressed me.)
In academia, it's well known that the way to "make your reputation" is not to pursue a spectrum of diverse interests, but to find the tiniest possible niche and repeat the same exercise, ad nauseam, for 30 or 40 years. In this way, you make yourself "indispensable"; if somebody wants to discuss "the motif of the canoe in American literature of the late 1830s," they won't be able to get away with ignoring your work . . . and the university you work for can sell itself as possessing the top 1830s canoe-guy (or -gal) in the academy.
I wonder if something similar doesn't happen with filmmakers -- that people like Ozu, by refining and refining the same movie over 40 years, enshrine themselves because they, and they alone, stand for a very specific cinematic idea, while artists who are a bit more restless are easier to ignore -- and, finally, to forget.
Of course, it's possible -- and even likely -- that I just haven't seen the right Ozu movies, the ones that will turn me around. But when a movie as obviously flawed as, e.g., Tokyo Twilight, is discussed as though it were above critique -- a masterpiece -- I become suspicious.
On another message board on this site -- "The Worst Criterion Essayist Ever," or something -- one of the posters ridiculed a critic for calling Hitchcock's movies "superficial." I happen to love Hitchcock, but that idea -- that there's a certain superficiality to some of his work -- doesn't strike me as heretical, insulting, or insane; I'd like to hear more of this critic's opinion, and see whether and to what extent I disagree. But in this forum post, the idea that a critic had called Hitchcock's movies "superficial" was viewed as so discrediting in itself that it required no response; the fact that somebody would venture to make a mild criticism of Hitchcock was enough to totally discredit the critic.
I mention this here because of the reviews I've read of the Ozu box -- even Dave Kehr's in the New York Times -- very few of them have done a good job explaining what it is about these movies that makes them so vibrant, and essential. Instead, the critics sound hamstrung, intimidated.
Are Ozu's films -- like Hitchcock's -- so canonical that their essential greatness is no longer open to serious debate? And another question: when a film (or filmmaker) achieves that status, isn't the film less alive, somehow?
Anyway, I look forward to hearing some of the Ozu-philes' responses. In the meantime, consider me an Ozu fan in the making.
