The second film by Yasujiro Ozu I watched.
The color of the picture is gorgeous, with a lot of gorgeous red. With the cheerful and lively music, it shows a variety of pain and joy.
The expression of the lens is authentic. It is full of Japanese markets and civilian life. The entrance halls, corridors and stairs of Japanese-style houses have a strong sense of home. The taverns and restaurants where people came and went, and the troupe that staged Japanese Noh in "Floating Grass", walked back and forth in the movie.
The characters in it, classified in Chinese, belong to the grass-roots class. Their lives are adrift, subject to weather and geography, and have no fixed occupation and social status. There is one scene in the movie that I will never forget, the three dolls in the troupe fantasize about eating, drinking and having fun at the seaside. Perhaps at that moment, their spirits were released, but the feeling of happiness was like seabirds flying in the sky, ethereal and fleeting.
Borrowing scenes to express emotions is Ozu's favorite way. The first climax of the conflict, the two scolded each other across the street, separated by a rain curtain without breakpoints. The rain was particularly heavy, the mood was high, and the tone was very low. The distance between the class leader and the geisha, or the psychological distance, is like the barrier of a storm, and it is always difficult to reach each other. Wrath raged in the storm.
The composition of Ozu films is closed. There is a slight difference, a sense of missing a thousand miles. His approach to film is unusually serious. Legend has it that Yanjiro Mura and Haruko Sugimura have talked about sixty or seventy times in the scene where the cockles are blooming the most and most beautiful in the yard.
As we all know, the cameras in Ozu's films are always shot from a low position, basically below the line of sight of the characters, in order to reflect an objective attitude. It feels like there are no bystanders in life. The director adopts a contemplative attitude, and the camera does not move a lot, which is in line with the Japanese characteristics of "quiet". The stillness here does not rule out the ambient sound that often occurs in movies, because life cannot be peaceful, and the turbulence is the truth. In addition, Ozu basically does not use close-up of characters, and the people who talk usually appear in one picture, which instills a sense of equality - in that era when Japan's concept of hierarchy was quite strong.
The film expresses two emotions: the gentleness of Eastern Zen and the violence of Western powers. The mother played by Haruko Sugimura is a traditional figure with the gentle and graceful temperament of oriental women. The fact that she has an illegitimate child with the class teacher is the dramatic conflict of this film. Everything is due to the arrival of an "old" class master troupe, and the mother treats him like a regular guest in form, without any trace of closeness. The relationship between husband and wife is like a guest, subtle and ambiguous. Containing but not revealing in oriental aesthetics permeates in the details. After a while, I gradually realized that they had a festival before. . . Well, the sexiness in the movie has an oriental verve, beautiful kimono dress, the graceful and soft figure of a young woman, the sitting posture with soft curves, and the beauty of smiling without showing teeth (of course, there are also extremely ugly but grinning with teeth), There is also the simple and sincere love between Kadai and Qing in the second half, and Qing's shyness in love (in my opinion, that shy and young youth is a portrayal of Ozu himself) - these are the self-aesthetics that Ozu insists on. Of course, there is love and there is hate. Where there are twists and turns, there is violence. I remember that in the same scene, the class teacher first hit Jiadai twice, the second time was seven, and when he slapped his son, he was severely counterattacked. Everything has two sides, and of course the violence here reflects a kind of Japanese patriarchy.
Children always appear frequently in Ozu's films, and Fufang, the child in the troupe, is still fresh in memory. When the film is close to one hour and thirty minutes, the troupe collapses, revealing the sadness of separation, and the scene of the child chewing on the watermelon slightly relieves the heavy atmosphere and brings a little liveliness. But in the end, the whole army still collapsed, and the impermanence of ups and downs was felt in the tears in the scattered meals. Thirty years of Hedong, thirty years of Hexi, who can say for sure.
The ending of the film is open ended. The train, with its two dazzling red taillights, gradually faded away in the blue sky. The sky is a azure blue that dissolves black, and the symbolic meaning of the train going forward is self-evident. All in all, do it all over again - it's the monologues like this that let the long shots gallop, without boundaries, without boundaries.
It is at the moment of returning to the long road that we find a reason to reconcile with life.
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