Notes toward a Reading of Tokyo Twilight (Tokyo Boshoku)

On February 27th I was at last able to see Ozu's Tokyo Twilight for the first time. I am writing this on the 29th, to be in time for this issue's deadline: something I almost never do, especially for films of obviously high value, preferring to allow for time, reflection, discussion and (when possible) repeated viewings to deepen perception and correct misreadings. In this case there is little time and no chance of a repeated viewing: the film's solitary screening was part of the travelling Ozu retrospective, just drawing to its close at the Toronto Cinematheque. I have long thought of the film as 'the one nobody wants to talk about': it has received nothing like the attention of certain films that preceded it (e.g. Late Spring, Tokyo Story) or the late colour films that followed it. And I was intrigued by the idea of an Ozu film that dealt with issues such as premarital sex, abortion and suicide. Its juxtaposition with Equinox Flower (made one year later, 1958) is startling: not only Ozu's last film in black-and-white next to his first in colour, but also his bleakest (it reminded Richard Lippe of Ingmar Bergman) next to one of his mellowest and most life-affirming. The opposition is not only general (subject-matter, characterization ...) but signalled in tiny details. Two motifs (authorial signatures)--trains, and laundry hung up to dry--occur through most of Ozu's work, the former in (I think) every film from Story of Floating Weeds on, the latter in many of the silent films as well. The trains represent the possibility of movement and change, arrival and departure, the laundry notions of cleansing and starting afresh. Tokyo Twilight is among the very rare Ozu films in which laundry does not appear; in Equinox Flower the image is reserved for the triumphant ending, with brilliantly coloured laundry on lines, celebrating the triumph of the conspiracy of women over the patriarch. Trains, on the other hand, are insisted upon throughout Tokyo Twilight, but always with overtones of melancholy or tragedy (Akiko's suicide, departure of the mother). The juxtaposition of the two films confirms once again one of Ozu's most important characteristics as artist and human being: his remarkable openness to the complexities, contradictions and potentialities of human life--the more remarkable, perhaps, for an artist who is widely known for the apparently limited range of his subject-matter (though the retrospective has shown this to apply only to the 'late', postwar period, and even there is more apparent than real). [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Writing, then, in haste, I want to examine briefly a number of aspects of the film, and it seems convenient and in the interests of clarity to number them. They are not in any order of importance but they are at least partly sequential. 1. The Ozu 'System'. So much has been written about Ozu's highly idiosyncratic stylistics that it might appear redundant to raise the matter yet again. I shall, however, take for granted that readers are fully aware of their nature. (I prefer the word 'system' here to 'style': both terms, if they have any authenticity, derive directly from the artist and 'express' him or her, but 'style' often has overtones of something deliberately cultivated and applied externally, whereas a 'system', going beyond 'style' to include subject matter, is, essentially, the 'person'--one might say, the diagram of the person). The aspect of Ozu's system that needs to be stressed here is its openness, its non-judgemental quality--more specifically, his refusal to use cinematic means to tell his audience how they should judge the characters: camera angle (high, low, tilt shots), lighting (bright, dark ...), camera distance. All his characters are filmed, essentially, in the same way, and the lighting is that of the specific environment. We are left to judge them from what they say, what they do, their expressions, their behaviour, their motivation, their positions, the effects of their behaviour. …

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