Ozu

As I write this, my husband is watching a film by the Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu (Floating Weeds). I've seen two of his films, Tokyo Story and Late Spring, considered two of his best; Ozu is not among my favorite directors, but I have to admire his dedication to a certain filmic style and a few ageless themes in storytelling: cultural shifts and generation gaps, the fraught relationships of parents and children, the subtle tensions that can exist between friends.

One reason he isn't one of my favorites is what I consider a certain stiffness in the cinematography--head shots too perfectly framed, or a couple standing perfectly in a particular doorway, time and time again, for instance. This is one of the hallmarks of his style, I realize, but I'm not sure it's aged that well. I find myself repeatedly thinking about camera angles rather than the story at hand.

Also, it seems to me that Ozu steeps his films and his characters, too much sometimes, in natsukashii--a Japanese sentiment that goes beyond nostalgia. A quick search on the Internet brings up this definition: "A bittersweet nostalgia for a past as it is recalled, not necessarily as it actually was." Natsukashii is one of those Japanese words that is much more than a word, it's an important cultural signifier, indicating something about Japanese life that is very difficult for a foreigner to understand. I'm sure that I don't fully understand it, so I'm not really qualified to talk about it. But it seems to me that in his films, Ozu expresses a near-constant natsukashii for a sort of Japan that I'm not sure ever really existed.

Not that that's so terrible. But I can't get over the feeling, watching his films, that his characters are mere symbols of one kind or another--this person represents a lost Japan, this person is part of the new Japan, this person is caught in between, and so forth.

Or maybe I'm overintellectualizing the whole thing...at any rate, the reason I wanted to write about him for this blog is the father-daughter relationship in Late Spring. I wonder sometimes how I'd handle it if my son failed to make his way as an independent adult, either because he rebelled against all parental restraints and made wrong choices as a teenager, or because he simply became lazy about leaving the nest. (I know the whole issue of "leaving the nest" is based on the very American idea that children should leave home when they reach adulthood, or at least soon after that--an idea which is much less prevalent in Japan and many other countries. But having said that--it's not always such a bad idea, for everyone concerned.) There's no way to predict the future. But I know that it has to do with striking the right balance, consistently striking it, between coddling him and allowing him plenty of room to explore...

It's a tough one. I probably won't get it right until he's thirty-five or so.