Tokyo Story

For the last decade of global film culture this film has often been placed at the top of the tallest tree: ‘The Greatest Ever’. Tokyo Story’s deepest wells of emotion spring forth in mysteriously artful ways; they surprise, with a wondrous sympathetic sadness. Simplicity is all: An elderly couple travels from southern Japan to Tokyo to see their adult children, who barely have time for them. And on the way home there is a change… Ozu’s unwavering style is transcendent; this extraordinary film merits every word of fascination.

‘Tokyo Story belongs to a genre that, in the later postwar phase of his career, Ozu was almost exclusively associated with: the home drama. Its setup was loosely based on an earlier American film, Make Way for Tomorrow (1937), directed by Leo McCarey. The idiosyncratic approach, however, is unmistakeably that of its maker, frequently analysed but seldom emulated. Everything is underplayed in the archetypical Ozu film, but everything from framing to pacing to every nuance of gesture or inflection within the dialogue was meticulously planned. In this we should not underestimate the role of Kogo Noda, Ozu’s long-term screenwriter on over half his works, from his debut The Sword of Penitence (1927) to his final film, An Autumn Afternoon (1962), with whom he painstakingly hammered out every last detail of what ended up on screen. Ozu considered the screenplay as a blueprint to adhere to exactly, with every shot in the film and every movement within it preordained.’

Jaspar Sharp, BFI