The exquisite sadness of Yasujiro Ozu’s 1953 film, now re-released for its 70th anniversary, does not get any more bearable or less overwhelming with time. With each repeated viewing, the film of tears obscuring my own view of its star Setsuko Hara appears earlier and earlier, making her heartbreakingly decent, courageous smile shimmer and wobble. Ozu’s distinctive and stylised idiom, with low shooting angles and direct sightlines into camera, creates something mesmerically formal to match the drama’s emotional restraint, which is more devastating when the dam is breached. When Hara’s smile finally drops, it is like a gunshot.
Chieko Higashiyama and Ozu’s repertory stalwart Chishu Ryu play the elderly Tomi and Shukichi, who live in the quiet town of Onomichi; they are gentle country mice, almost childlike in the calm, smiling way they address each other. This heartbreakingly modest couple have taken the decision in the evening of their lives (although apparently only in their 60s: Ryu was in fact just 49 when the film was first released) to make the arduous and bewildering journey to Tokyo in the sweltering summer to visit their grownup children.
As the drama continues, poor Tomi is to suffer dizzy spells, about which she and her husband tell no one, and Ozu and his longtime collaborating screenwriter Kogo Noda leave it up to us to decide what is behind them: did she always intended this visit to be a poignant, unacknowledged goodbye, or did the stress of the journey suddenly damage her fragile health. The old lady asks her little grandson if he wants to be a doctor like his father and then says, wonderingly, almost to herself: “When you are a doctor, where shall I be?”; you can see the flash of anxiety in her eyes. Only in front of this unheeding, uncomprehending infant can she speak aloud her fear of death.
The awful truth is that their grownup children are heartless, selfish and have no time for them. The eldest son Koichi (So Yamamura) is a rather self-important doctor; he actually cancels a little day-trip that was organised for Tomi and Shukichi because he needs to make a house-call and imperiously decides that his wife Fumiko (Kuniko Miyake) cannot take them herself and leave the house empty. Their snobbish, grasping daughter Shige (Haruko Sugimura) runs a beauty salon, and she privately tells a customer that they are “just some friends from the country” – a horribly Dickensian touch. The other son Keizo (Shiro Osaka) lives in Osaka, and has no obvious desire to make the trip to visit. Their youngest daughter Kyoko lives with the couple in their hometown: she is played by Kyoko Kagawa (still alive at 91).
The only person who loves and cares about Shukichi and Tomi is their widowed daughter-in-law Noriko, unforgettably played by Hara, who was married to their son Shoji, still missing in action after the second world war. It is Noriko who takes her parents-in-law on a sightseeing trip in Tokyo (although she too is busy and has to ask for time off work); and it is Noriko who has Tomi to stay in her tiny flat (while Shukichi stays with Shige) after the collapse of the children’s callous plan to make the old people stay at a tatty cut-price “hot springs” vacation resort, rather than spend another moment in their company.
Noriko in fact loves them like her own parents. Partly it is because they are her only reminder of her late husband, and partly that she just loves them – it is as simple as that. This is a movie which is partly about the dismal and banal fear of disappointment at the end of one’s life: in a famous scene, Kyoko asks Noriko: “Isn’t life disappointing?” and she sadly agrees. While boozing with some old friends, Shukichi ponders the terrible unmentionable feeling of disappointment with one’s children. And yet disappointment is not the key theme in Tokyo Story; there is nothing disappointing about Noriko’s heroic and magnificent integrity in asserting her love for Tomi and Shukichi.
Shukichi becomes the centre of the film’s mysterious invocation of death and mortality. His bland, emollient smile never seems to leave him, even when talking about the saddest and most painful things of all; Tomi dies, but he never cries. How does he feel about his wife’s death? How did he feel about her when she was alive? Perhaps he is close enough to death to have already said goodbye to life and to his own identity. What a stunning work of art this is.
• Tokyo Story is released on 1 September in UK and Irish cinemas.
