CRITERION CARAVAN #20: A Story of Floating Weeds
Dir: Yashijuro Ozu (1934)
Here I am at last, making my way chronologically through all the Criterions available streaming online for some insane reason, and finally I have come to the end of the silent era. I said that once before, but it turned out there was still one more waiting for me, but this time, this is it.
So Ozu we know is perhaps the greatest humanist director of all time. He takes these very just mundane stories and you’re sitting there and watching it and saying, well, this seems a lot of fuss about a couple going to visit their kids for a weekend, and you get fed up and start saying, can we get on with it already, and then all of a sudden you’re bawling like a two-year old because its so sad, these people are just longing for this human connection and just want to be with their family and they can’t for all sorts of dumb reasons.
ASOFW is one of those too. The ne’er do well head of a touring kabuki troop comes back to the town where he left behind his mistress and son, who thinks he’s just an uncle. Kabuki masters are a fickle lot. They can’t be tied down you know, being artists and subject to so much temptation you know. But now he sees his son has grown into a fine young man and feels left out, even if he gets to take him fishing now and then. He doesn’t seem to miss the mistress much, but it’s hard to go around with your son thinking you’re his uncle.
That’s pretty much it and it ambles along a little tediously until it becomes incredibly poignant and heartbreaking. The stuff of workaday tragedy and all.
Ozu liked the story so much that he remade it 20 years later as a talkie. You might like that one better. I can’t say because it will probably be 20 years at this pace until I get there on my Criterion Caravan. But if you’re in the mood to go silent, frankly, it’s such a touching, simple film that you won’t even remember that they weren’t talking during it. Besides that they wouldn’t’ve been speaking english anyway.
