I still learned about Yasujiro Ozu from the recommendation of others. In 2010, the person who introduced him said that this is a director who can make people see despair from calm.
I don't know if I got such a guide. I can only watch one at a time, so I haven't finished the works of this prolific director yet.
It may be because of the director's own experience of living with his mother. Most of his films focus on family. In the quiet narrative, the story climaxes in the final family conflict.
The theme of children in his films is to escape. In "Floating Grass", Ziji has been preparing for college, without considering what would happen to a mother who raised her alone without her company; a drama about an uncle who is suspected of being his biological father , but also the attitude of looking down and ridiculing; the love at first sight with the actress, unsurprisingly went to elope, and willfully asks the mother to accept the lover.
The director seems to be tortured: When we were young, how heartless did we treat our parents like this? In "Tokyo Story", it seems that such a problem is most clearly expressed: the indifference and neglect of adult children towards their parents are slowly spread out in a melodious rhythm, which is simply bloodless cruelty.
But the director's thinking obviously doesn't stop there. "Floating Grass" is a relatively late work. The director chose the head of the wandering troupe as the protagonist. Obviously, he wanted to go further on this kind of issue: the disappointment of our parents when we were young, it seems that we paid for our children when we were parents. . Why is this cycle?
Sometimes I wonder if the unreserved devotion to our children is an expression of our growing attachment to the world as we grow older? Humans are very strange animals, we are born with the consciousness of death, we will disappear eventually. Therefore, the reproduction of offspring has an additional meaning of spiritual inheritance for us. And can the devotion to future generations be regarded as our efforts to "leave traces of wild geese passing by"?
In other words, it's all just a small thing we are fighting against loneliness. .
The head of the group in "Floating Grass" is a rootless person. He secretly sponsors his son to go to school, but always accompanies him as an uncle. After the disbandment of the troupe, he occasionally misses the idea of returning to his family. After the conflict, he decided to embark on a wandering road again.
Japanese parents treat their children as unreservedly as Chinese parents, but they show considerable independence after their children become adults. There are even extreme cases where the father begs alone so as not to affect the adult children after bankruptcy.
We have a long-standing admonition to "don't travel far when your parents are here", but such a request seems to be considered pedantic nowadays. The construction of values with filial piety as the core has ushered in great turmoil.
In Japan in 1959, such a value orientation seemed to have emerged. And the meaning of this is beyond debate.
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