Every Unhappy Family Is Unhappy In Its Own Way

Title: Tokyo Story

Rating: 4 Stars

In 2019 and 2020, I was able to work my way through the entire AFI list of best American films (2008 edition). Since then, I’ve continued to watch a lot of films. I’ve even now branched a little bit into foreign films.

A couple of months ago, the Sight and Sound magazine (published by the British Film Institute) released its version of the best 250 films ever made. Clearly these lists are highly subjective. How do you develop a relative ranking between Citizen Kane, Blazing Saddles, Pulp Fiction, and King Kong?

Even so, I find lists such as these useful because they do distill the tens of thousands (if not more) films that have been made over the last 100 or so years into a list of films that at least some people consider to be important. By this time, I now have a basic knowledge of international films. I’ve seen a small set of French, Japanese, Swedish, Korean, German, and Italian films. Eyeballing the Sight and Sound list, at least half of the films are international. The list could be a useful tool to point me towards films that I’ve missed or, more likely, have never heard of.

Of the top twelve films in the list, a full half of them (Citizen Kane, Vertigo, 2001, Sunrise, The Godfather, and Singin’ In The Rain) had already appeared in the AFI 100. Therefore, my first goal will be to watch the other six films so that I can at least claim to have watched the top twelve films.

I decided to start with Tokyo Story (coming in at number four, right behind Citizen Kane). It seemed like a good bet because I’ve at least heard of the film. I already knew a little something about it.

A Japanese film made in 1953, it’s the story of two parents and their relationship to their adult children. The parents visit Tokyo, where two of their children and their widowed daughter-in-law (her husband, their son, has died fighting in the war) live. Unfortunately, their son the doctor and their daughter who owns a hair salon have very little time for them. The children claim to be too busy to chaperone their parents around the city. It falls to their daughter-in-law, who herself is busy, to take time off from her work and to show them the sights of Tokyo. Although grateful for their daughter-in-law, the parents are disappointed that their children have no time for them.

To get their parents off their backs, their children pool money to send them to a spa. It’s too loud and busy for the parents’ taste, so they come back early, much to their children’s dismay. The parents, knowing that they are a burden to their children, cut their visit short and go home early. On their way back home, the mother falls ill.

Told that their mother is near death, all of the children (including the daughter-in-law) rush to her bedside. She dies shortly after. One child, off on a business trip, arrives after her mother has died. The children, as soon as possible, leave their father to head back to their busy lives. Once again, it’s up to the daughter-in-law to comfort the father in his grief.

As she’s leaving, in gratitude her father gives her the mother’s watch and tells her how much he appreciates her kindness even though she is not a blood relation. As she leaves, the father is left pensively contemplating his future days of loneliness.

First things first. Although I enjoyed the film, you need to come into with expectations. First of all, it’s subtitled, so you have to be comfortable with that. Secondly, it’s two and a half hours long. Third, there is not a lot of action. The director, Yasujirō Ozu, is a minimalist. Most of the action (eg train rides) take place off screen. He strongly favors stationary cameras. In fact, I believe that in the entire film there is only one shot where the camera is moving (and I’m not even sure why he did it there since it wasn’t really necessary). He nearly always positions his stationary camera at a low angle. In scenes, characters walk in and out of the stationary camera shot.

All of that is to say that it’s a pretty long, slow moving film. If you go into the film with that expectation, I think that you will be rewarded because Ozu brings out a number of themes revolving around family that still resonate today. However, if you go into the film expecting to see a Kurosawa style film full of action with Toshiro Mifune’s operatic level of emotional intense acting, you will be quite disappointed.

Since the film was made in 1953, it seems fair to say that the parents represent pre-war Japan and the children represent post-war. The parents live out in the country while their children are in bustling Tokyo. The parents move slowly and dress in old fashioned clothes while their children are hustling in the new much faster paced (Western based) world. The staging shots in the parent’s home town of Onomichi are of temples and old fashioned housing while the staging shots in Tokyo are modern buildings under construction and bustling streets. Although in the same country, the two generations are living lives almost unrecognizably different.

Although understated, this leads to generational differences. Not only are the children too busy to spend time with their parents, they seem to be embarrassed by them. Although apparently the parents very rarely visit, at the first opportunity the children shunt them away to the spa. At some level, the children are aware that they are behaving improperly but just can’t help but to see their parents as an inconvenience. The parents can’t but help noticing this disregard.

On other other hand, the parents are pretty clearly disappointed with their children. While drunk, the father admits that he’s disappointed that, with his medical education, his son is still nothing but a lowly neighborhood doctor. They come from a tradition where their elders were treated with respect. They’re disappointed that it’s their daughter-in-law, not their blood children, that seem to respect that tradition and treats them accordingly.

Wrapped in all of this is grief and guilt. When the mother dies, the children, especially the one that missed her death, understand that they have not treated their parents with the respect that they deserve. They feel the sting of their anguish.

Loneliness in the modern world is also a theme. The last scene is the father, sitting by himself, looking out a window. It appears that this will be how he will likely live out his remaining years. The daughter-in-law, widowed now for eight years, admits that she is desperately lonely. The father, understanding her pain, takes her by her hand and implores her to forget him and to seek out her happiness while she still has time.

Tokyo Story is a lovely story slowly told.