Tokyo Story
| Tokyo Story | |
|---|---|
 Film poster | |
| Directed by | Yasujiro Ozu |
| Written by | Kôgo Noda Yasujiro Ozu |
| Produced by | Takeshi Yamamoto |
| Starring | Chishu Ryu Chieko Higashiyama Setsuko Hara |
| Cinematography | Yuuharu Atsuta |
| Edited by | Yoshiyasu Hamamura |
| Music by | Kojun Saitô |
| Distributed by | Shochiku (Japan theatrical) Criterion (Region 1 DVD) |
Release dates | 3 November, 1953 (Japan) 13 March, 1972 (USA) |
Running time | 136 min. |
| Language | Japanese |
Tokyo Story (東京物語, Tokyo monogatari) is a 1953 Japanese film directed by Yasujiro Ozu. It tells the story of a mother and father who travel to the bustling metropolis of Tokyo to visit their grown children, but find their children are too absorbed in their own lives to spend much time with their parents.
Synopsis
Two elderly parents Shukichi (Chishu Ryu) and Tomi Hirayama (Chieko Higashiyama) from the small seaside town of Onomichi in southwest Japan pay a visit to their busy children in Tokyo — a journey that, before the introduction of the bullet train, took almost a day. After the arduous journey, they find themselves neglected by their children. The children genuinely wish to spend time with their parents, and do to an extent, but as they have lives and families of their own they find it difficult to maintain a balance between the two. Only the couple's widowed daughter-in-law Noriko, played by Setsuko Hara, goes out of her way to entertain them.
Style
Like all of Ozu's sound films, Tokyo Story is not melodramatic or structured around Hollywood plot points; its pacing is slow (or, as David Bordwell prefers to describe it, "calm").[1] Important events are often not shown on screen, only being revealed later through dialogue; for example, Ozu does not depict the mother and father's journey to Tokyo at all.[2]
Ozu uses his distinctive camera style, often called “tatami-level”, in which the camera height is low and seldom moves; film critic Roger Ebert wryly notes that once in the film the camera actually pans away from a stationary view, which is "more than usual" for Ozu.[3].
Acclaim and status
In Sight and Sound magazine's regular polls of directors and critics, Tokyo Story is regularly listed as one of the ten greatest films ever made. John Walker, editor of the Halliwell's Film Guides, places Tokyo Story at the top of his published list of the best 1000 films ever made. Tokyo Story is also included in film critic Derek Malcolm's The Century of Films, a list of films that Malcolm deems artistically or culturally important, and Time Magazine lists it among their All-Time 100 Movies. Roger Ebert includes it in his series of great movies,[3] and Paul Schrader placed it in the "Gold" section of his Film Canon.[4]
The film was recently restored and released on DVD by The Criterion Collection as a two-disc DVD set (Region 1).
References
- ^ David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson, Film History: An Introducion, 2nd edtn (McGraw-Hill, 2003), 396.
- ^ David Desser, 'The Space of Ambivalence' in Film Analysis, ed. Jeffrey Geiger (Norton, 2005), 462-3.
- ^ a b Roger Ebert's review of "Tokyo Story"
- ^ Paul Schrader's Film Canon, Film Comment - September/October 2006
External links
- Tokyo Story at IMDb
- Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian, June 10, 2005, "The quiet master"
- Tokyo Story at the Arts & Faith Top100 Spiritually Significant Films list
- Criterion Collection essay by David Bordwell
- "東京物語 (Tokyo monogatari)" (in Japanese). Japanese Movie Database. Retrieved 2007-07-13.