Yasujirō Ozu
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The film is not fueled by incident or melodrama - the clearest break it makes from its avowed inspiration, Leo McCarey's heart-rending Make Way for Tomorrow of 1937 - but by character interactions: the film simply places us in the middle of a family situation and allows us to be thrilled and enthralled by the greatest cinematic spectacle of them all, the feelings of human beings.
With its debt to Leo McCareys trenchantly titled Make Way for Tomorrow sixteen years earlier, Yasujiro Ozus Tokyo Story/Tokyo monogatari is no less true, shattering, and not for viewers fretting about unsympathetic grown-up children.
Before they depart, the couple treat themselves to a bittersweet night on the town, and it is here that McCarey’s masterful mise en scène recalls the spare profundity of a Japanese landscape print—no surprise that the film is the ostensible inspiration for Yasujirô Ozu’s Tokyo Story.
Of these, the filmmaker's personal favorite and arguably his film with the highest overall reputation among those who've seen it is Make Way for Tomorrow , our current subject; I am not myself quite inclined to call it better than Duck Soup or fellow 1937 release The Awful Truth (with which it shares screenwriter Viña Delmar), but that's pretty damn good company to be in regardless; and serving as the inspiration for Tokyo Story isn't too shabby either.
Tokyo Story was co-written by a longtime associate of Ozu's, Kogo Noda, who felt inspired by his memories of having watched Leo McCarey's Make Way for Tomorrow, a tremendously heartfelt 1937 Hollywood drama which recounts a similar story.
Columbus (2017)
Directed by Kogonada
influenced by Tokyo Story (1953), An Autumn Afternoon (1962)
Visuals
This is one impressive feature debut by the South Korean immigrant Kogonada, who chose that name for himself, a homage to the moniker of Ozu’s Tokyo Story scenarist, Kogo Noda.
The name is a film-nerd nod to the writer of some of the greatest classics made by the Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu, such as Tokyo Story and An Autumn Afternoon .
Kogonada, who wrote the script and edited his film with an eye to the classic film symmetry of Yasujiro Ozu’s Tokyo Story, also follows another character.
The name is a film-nerd nod to the writer of some of the greatest classics made by the Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu, such as Tokyo Story and An Autumn Afternoon .
Comparisons are already being drawn to films such as Yasujirō Ozu’s Tokyo Story (1953).
The cumulative result of Cuarón’s inquisitive lens (he is also the cinematographer) is an astounding interplay of foreground and background, with artistry that measures up to the meticulously choreographed films of Tokyo Story’s Yasujirô Ozu, and political content akin to Italian neorealist classics like Rome, Open City.
I’ve seen some comparisons to Yasujirō Ozu’s Tokyo Story and, well, maybe.
It's frighteningly contemporary in the way it examines the same themes as films like Ordinary People and American Beauty, for example.
Denis is known for the tender father-daughter relationship depicted in her 35 Shots of Rum (a retelling of Ozu’s Late Spring), but she more recently took up the theme in Bastards, her 2013 adaptation of Faulkner’s Sanctuary that reaches a horrifying and incestuous conclusion.
Inspired by their beauty (one has different colored transparent stalls which turn opaque when occupied, another projects glowing patterns while yet another looks like a grouping of modernist huts), Wenders instead, along with cowriter Takuma Takasaki, came up with an idea for a fictional film about a man who cleans these toilets for a living, his lead character's name taken from Ozu's “Tokyo Story,” a film dear to Wenders' heart.
The famous Japanese politeness that perplexes Bill Murray's stranded actor in Lost in Translation starts to seem like one giant coping mechanism to soften the blows that life deals out so casually.
And similarly, there’s the sensation of Dad singing a silly wake-up song, only I remembered my dad’s rendition of “Good Morning” from Singin’ in the Rain (1952).
Like all truly great films (“Tokyo Story,” “How Green Was My Valley,” “Saving Silverman,” et al.)
While predictably, the two misfits eventually form a bond, Minari expands upon this clichéd connection between grandmother and grandson (yes, Ozu’s Tokyo Story comes to mind) to tackle more substantive issues of what it means to cultivate a better life and what it takes for relationships to survive and thrive, even in the worst of times.
(There are few traces of Tokyo Story in this Tokyo story.)
For me, the film ranks with works like Kieslowski’s Double Life of Veronique, Ozu’s Tokyo Story, Kurosawa’s Ran, Kitano’s Hana-bi, Sokurov’s Mother and Son, Malick’s The Tree of Life, or other narrative films in which the visuals are so overwhelming, hypnotic and utterly transcendental that trying to capture much of what the film has to say in words is impossible.