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| Product Detail |
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Audio Format: DD 2.0
Video Format: Full Screen
Languages: Japanese
Subtitles: English
Region Code: 1
Year Made: 1962
Running Time: 112
Release Date: 09/30/2008
Please note: PRE-ORDER
This title will be released on Sep. 30, 2008, and you may order it now.
As soon as we receive this title in stock, we will ship your order in timely manner.
The actual release date and information of this title may change without notice.
If your order includes otherIn Stock items, all relevant items will be shipped to you together with your pre-order item when it arrives.
Your credit card will be charged at the date of order placed to comfirm the purchase
 Director Yasujiro Ozu's final film, and a rare outing in color for him, continues his quietly observed explorations of family dynamics in postwar Japan. Frequent Ozu star Chishu Ryu plays Shuhei Hirayama, an aging widower whose three children each depend upon him in varying degrees. The eldest, Kazuo, who is married, is a spendthrift who purchases a new set of golf clubs, then hits up his indulgent dad for a loan to buy a refrigerator. The middle child, daughter Michiko, is a 24-year-old still living at home and happy to be the domestic fulcrum between her father and her younger brother, Koichi, a willful teenager. Shuhei's conviction that Michiko isn't ready for marriage scares away a potential suitor in whom she is also interested. But the old man has a change of heart after a long drinking session with several buddies, who warn him that Michiko might wind up an old maid, trapped in the web of loneliness he knows all too well. He arranges a marriage for her, and she finds herself caught between her own desires and her duty to her father. The story ends on the late afternoon of Michiko's wedding day, as Shuhei returns to his home to face life on his own, resigned to the fact that his daughter's happiness comes before his own.
No great director confined both his subject matter and technique like Yasujiro Ozu, and this, his final film, sums up so much of what makes that tunnel vision so eloquent. As in his masterpiece, Tokyo Story, and so many other films, Ozu observes, with an amazing blend of discretion and intimacy, the tangled relationships of Japanese families. His camera barely moves, remaining for the most part at the same level, not far above the floor. His editing is leisurely, and he frequently allows scenes to play out in real time. For all of the intense emotions in his stories, there are no confrontations; however, the flickerings of disappointment and resentment across the faces of his characters speak loudly enough. Ozu veteran Chishu Ryu is once again the kindly patriarch, indulging his married son, oblivious to his teenaged boy, and caught up in a relationship of mutual dependence with his daughter. He wants to do right by her, stifling any notion of her independence, only to reverse himself when he understands how selfish his actions are. The daughter is forced to take cues from her father, resigning herself (after a failed romance) to a happy domestic life with her father and younger brother, only to learn that she is to be married after all. Rather than frame this reversal as an act of hypocrisy, Ozu prefers to see it in gently ironic terms. A widower is forced to push away the one person in his life who loves him without demands or reservation. Even if Ozu didn't foresee this as his final film, it ends on a wonderfully elegiac note.
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