Ozu: Trilogie Noriko

Focus

Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu made over 30 silent films but he is most famous for his chronicles of family life in post-war Japan. While the country was rapidly changing, Ozu’s films have a meditative, Zen-like quality as they examine how human desire and actual behaviour are often tragically at odds with one another. Often, people do things they don’t want to respect traditions or bow to peer pressure but sometimes, we do things we don’t too out of embarrassment or fear.

Tokyo Story, from 1953, is Ozu’s most famous work and the closing part of an informal trilogy of films that also includes Late Spring (1949) and Early Summer (1951). The stories are not related but they share many thematic and stylistic similarities, as well as actress Setsuko Hara, who always plays a character called Noriko, though she is a different woman in each film.

Each Noriko is like Nipponese Mona Lisa – she comes armed with a mysterious smile. Noriko doesn’t really like to talk about her feelings and she feels the pressure to be seen to do the right thing, even if this goes against her own wishes. In the earliest films, she’s in her 20s and people want her to get married, while in the third, she plays a young widow who’s much nicer to her parents-in-law than the couple’s other grown children. In all three, Noriko doesn’t seem to be fully in charge of her own life. Once you get to know her, it becomes clear that her timid smile hides all sort of things but that happiness isn’t necessarily one of them.

If there were something like a sacred treasure of the cinema, then for me that would have to be the work of Yasujiro Ozu. Never before and again has cinema been so close to its essence and purpose: to present an image of man in our century, a usable, true and valid image in which he not only recognises himself, but from which, above all, he may learn about himself.