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The last movie i saw was Ozu's 晩春, (Late spring, 1949). This is the first of the Noriko movies and the first of the season movies. I thought i'd seen this one previously -- because but i never had.
This one had an odd effect on me. I'm usually not a fan of Hara Setsuko, but i even thought she was sexy in this one. Ryu Chishu was very cute as the overly attached father. Even Sugimura Haruko was good. Sugimura usually gets too into her characters, but in this one, she delivers her lines precise diction, that delivers just the right effect. That i have this opinion of her may be because i've seen her in more Naruse films. Naruse was more willing to let actors be themselves. On the other hand, Ozu had an idea of how each particular performance should unfold. (Not that Naruse didn't have an idea -- he did. He just knew what he was going to get from each member of the cast, and let them do their thing -- within certain, very well-defined limits, of course.)
Immediately afterward, the film had me thinking about my daughter, my family, and left me feeling a bit nostalgic and sad. It was a bit of a downer, really, but i suppose the nuclear and sub-nuclear family is itself a bit of a downer.
The DVD came with Wenders' Tokyo-ga, which i'd seen before. Tokyo-ga is a film about watching film and the alieanation that entails. Wenders goes to Tokyo in search of the city he's seen in Ozu films. It's not there, of course, and Ozu and Werner Herzog rip on contemporary Tokyo because of that lack. Wenders and Herzog end up acting out their own alienation from the alienation they argue is at the core of Ozu's films in ridiculous ways. So where does that leave the viewers? I think it leaves them with an antidote against the Orientalist readings of the films given in Tokyo-ga.
Wenders' voiceovers are in English, but i swear i saw this in German once. My memory fails me. It was made for German TV.
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