Tokyo Story Review

Ozu had made this film before, in pieces, across twenty years of family pictures, and here he finally gets the whole shape of it. Shukichi and Tomi Hirayama arrive in Tokyo, are shunted between a tired doctor son and a hairdresser daughter who resents the interruption, and end up parked at a hot spring in Atami where the young guests keep them awake. The only person with time for them is Noriko, the widow of a son killed in the war, who is not family by blood at all. Setsuko Hara plays her with a smile held one second too long, and the film's last movement turns that smile inside out.

Yuharu Atsuta's camera sits about three feet off the floor and hardly moves at all. Ozu cuts to a chimney, a washing line, a train, a corridor, and those shots do the work a score would do elsewhere. Chishu Ryu, then forty nine, plays a man of seventy without a single effortful gesture, and Haruko Sugimura makes the selfish daughter recognizable rather than monstrous, which is far harder and far worse to watch. The dialogue is flat courtesy almost throughout, which is why the two plain lines that break it land like a dropped plate.

The film was held back from the West for years on the theory that it was too Japanese to travel. It then took third in the Sight and Sound critics' poll in 1992 and again in 2012, fourth in 2022, and topped the directors' poll outright in 2012. Nothing in it is difficult. It is simply about the thing nobody wants to look at, which is that love and obligation are not the same and children mostly manage only the second.