Film Review
Aware that his studio, Shochiku, was switching to colour in 1958,
director Yasujiro Ozu intended that his final black-and-white feature
would be one that fully exploited the artistic potential of the medium.
It is fitting that
Tokyo Twilight,
the grimmest of Ozu's post-WWII films, should have the look and feel of
a film noir, the harsh, high-contrast lighting emphasising the
brutality meted out to the central protagonist, a vulnerable young
woman scarred by the failure of her parents' marriage. An aura of
fatalistic despair hangs over the film, and there are passages (such as
the excursions into the smog-shrouded backstreets of Tokyo) that are
hauntingly evocative of French poetic realist films of the 1930s, most
notably Marcel Carné's
Quai des brumes (1938).
The film's pessimistic tone was presumably fuelled by its director's
increasing disillusionment with the social trends that had taken place
in Japan since the end of the war - in particular the decreasing
importance of the family unit. In
Tokyo Story (1953), Ozu wryly
observed how the bond between parents and children ceases to have any
tangible quality once the children have left home and started to lead
independent lives.
Tokyo
Twilight goes one step further and shows families in crisis even
before the children have reached adolescence. One dysfunctional
family gives rise to another, and a wayward daughter is forced to have
an abortion when she becomes pregnant outside marriage. Unusually
for Ozu, the film has nothing to offer in the way of light relief and
just becomes bleaker and bleaker, culminating in a tragedy that seems
to be inescapable.
In common with the director's previous film,
Early Spring (1956),
Tokyo Twilight shows the influence
of American melodrama through its inclusion of such popular themes as
adultery and abandonment, a concession that Ozu had to make to popular
tastes at the time. However, it also fits within Ozu's series of
'home dramas', convincingly presenting the complex relationship between
family members - here a father and his two daughters, each of whom is
visibly affected by the absence of the mother. The strained
relationship between parents and children - already powerfully explored
in
Tokyo Story - attains even
more tragic proportions here as the characters find it virtually
impossible to communicate with one another. The burning
resentment that Akiko feels for the mother who abandoned her when she
was a toddler is a sufficient stimulus to drive her to her doom, and
even the older and wiser Takako seems to find it hard to forgive her
parents for the break-up of their marriage.
It is a gloomy end to Ozu's run of black-and-white films,
Tokyo Twilight being as much a
requiem for the traditional family unit as for a style of filmmaking
that had become tired and démodé. Like Shochiku,
Ozu would have to learn to move with the times as, like it or not,
modern Japan was here to stay. The death of the fragile Akiko
coincides with the death of an ideal that meant a great deal to Ozu but
which was no longer a cultural imperative. By the late 1950s, the
family had ceased to be the crucial building block of Japanese society
around which everything revolved. The economic boom had created a
new reality in which western-style individualism was to gain ascendancy
over the old values and traditions.
© James Travers 2013
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Next Yasujirô Ozu film:
Equinox Flower (1958)
Film Synopsis
Shukichi Sugiyama is a senior bank employee who lives in Tokyo with his
two grown-up daughters, Akiko and Takako. It has been many years
since Shukichi's wife walked out on him and his daughters to pursue an
affair with another man, and now history appears to be repeating
itself. Takako has decided she can no longer cope with her
alcoholic husband and has moved back in with her father, taking her
infant daughter with her. Akiko, a college student, has managed
to get herself pregnant but her boyfriend, Kenji, avoids her when he
hears of this. Fearful of her father's reaction, Akiko borrows
some money from a friend and has an abortion. Already in a
distressed state, Akiko is further perturbed when she encounters a
woman who appears to be acquainted with her. She relates the
incident to her older sister, who soon discovers that the woman is
their mother...
© James Travers
The above content is owned by filmsdefrance.com and must not be copied.