Dir. Yasujiro Ozu
Ozu's Tokyo Story topped the 2012 Sight and Sound director's poll of the greatest films of all time, and came third in the combined critics and directors poll, behind Vertigo, and Citizen Kane. This is a phenomenally well-regarded film. It gladdens me immensely that a film that only moves the camera once can be so well-regarded by the great directors of the world. This a film that is still. No fancy moving one-shots, no fancy lighting effects, just a camera placed strategically well, and a scene played out by actors. The story is just as simple, two grandparents visit their children and grandchildren for a few days. That's the premise. The only narrative development is that the grandmother, Tomi (Chieko Higashiyama), falls critically ill and dies shortly after their return.
I've spoken before about how one human moment can redeem a film for me. Tokyo Story, in under two hours, made me mourn the loss of this woman. I genuinely felt a profound sense of loss for the remainder of the film without her. How is this achieved? Human moments, human moments in abundance. I'm actually not going to go into them, because I'd essentially be reading you the script, it's that good. The relationships between the visiting family members will be immediately familiar to anyone who has visited/has been visited by extended family. The reality of the drama is spot-on, and is accurately acted even by the younger actors.
Anyway, I'm blabbing on. The reason I chose the hand fan, or rather fans, from this film is a bit of an obtuse way of discussing how Tomi's death resonates with the audience. Throughout the film, and I really do mean throughout, people use fans to keep themselves cool, naturally. In the beginning of the film, as we are introduced to Tomi and her husband, Shukichi (Chishu Ryu), with them chatting to each other in the gentle, calm way that life partners of a certain age do. No grand gestures of love, the dialogue itself fairly mundane, but it speaks wonders of the deep, deep love the two share. A neighbour walks by the window, and has a brief, neighbourly chat about their going away to visit family in Tokyo. It seems to be a nice routine, and is, again, immediately recognizable to all of us.
Jumping to the end of the film, Shukichi sits in the same room, alone, fanning himself. If you haven't seen the film, then I hope I'm conveying my message here with the structure of this post. For that neighbour, nothing has changed except that Tomi no longer sits with Shukichi. She does know of the death, and sympathizes with Shukichi, but she has no idea of the relationship development Tomi and Shukichi went through with their family in her final days. It's nothing drastic, but it tells us magnitudes about the characters and the family. The most monumental character moment actually occurs due to her death, with Shukichi giving Noriko (Setsuko Hara) Tomi's watch as a memento. He gives this to his daughter-in-law, widowed due to the death of his son, and despite no blood relation, he emphasizes that she was the one who treated the two of them the best during the visit. It's heartrendingly beautiful, and I nearly chose the watch as the object for this reason. I honestly think if I grew up in Japan, where family bonds are so strong, that this moment would be even more powerful.
So why the fan? Because it's unchanging. People change, people die, people drift from their parents. The fan is a constant in the film despite all the developments that occur. True, there's one less fan in the ending, and true, Shukichi, in his own restrained way is clearly grief-stricken in his discussion with the neighbour: "If I knew things would come to this, I'd have been kinder to her. Living alone like this, the days will get very long". But despite all this change, he still needs to cool himself with a fan, as do others. The fan, to me at least, links the personal story of this family to the wider world of Japan, as well as to the world at large, across time. It's a cliche, but the more things change, the more they stay the same.
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