Yasujiro Ozu-Ukikusa monogatari ('A Story of Floating Weeds') (1934)

This moody, lyrical work is loosely based on an American silent called The Barker. Infinitely superior to its model, it is the story of the leader of a small group of traveling players who returns to a small town and meets his son, the product of a distant affair. Ozu transforms the slightly melodramatic tale into an atmospheric and intense drama. Donald Richie has called this film, "the first of those eight-reel universes in which everything takes on a consistency greater than life: in short, a work of art." Its best feature is the depiction of life on the boards - the empty bowls to catch raindrops through the leaking roofs, the pantomime 'dog' who misses his cue and the casual cigarettes between exits and entrances. Ozu remade the film in colour in 1959 as Floating Weeds. OzuFilms




From a story by ""James Maki"", the pseudynom often used by Ozu, ""A Story of Floating Weeds"" is the second instalment of the ""Kihachi Trilogy"". Filmed in Kamisuwa, central Japan, this film is partially an adaptation of a silent American film by George Fitzmaurice. Ozu focuses on the theme of erosion of the family. It tells the story of Kihachi, a traveling kabuki troupe master who comes to a small village to perform. He decices to reunite with his former lover and their illegitimate son. Kihachi has hidden his relationship to his son all these years, this enrages his lover and results in heartbreak for all. SoAsian




One of Yasujiro Ozu's early masterworks, it concerns an actor, Kihachi (Takeshi Sakomoto) leading a struggling theater troupe who returns to the provincial town where he fathered a child years before. He seeks out his son, now a young man, and the woman who bore him, spending a great deal of time with them. To avoid angering his mistress Otaka (Rieko Yagumo), and to protect himself, he pretends to the young man that he is his uncle.




Nonetheless, Otaka eventually learns the truth and persuades one of the company's ingues to seduce the boy, hoping to hurt him and his father indirectly. Her plan backfires when the two fall in love, and the troupe, which is already on the brink of failure, is forced to disband. At length, Kihachi realizes he must move on and returns to Otaka.




Ozu's silent film, inspired by The Barker, a much inferior American film on a similar theme, might seem to inevitably be swamped by sentimentality, given the plot outline. But the director's genius adroitly avoids any hint of mawkishness by grounding the film in the most mundane details of daily life as he fashions one of the most powerfully moving works of his early career.




The pleasure taken by the actor in a moment of peace for a cigarette, water dropping through the roof of the rickety theater into bowls, the horny supporting actors of the troupe always on the make these and dozens of other carefully observed fragments of the ebb and flow of the quotidian, shot in the director's characteristically understated visual style, emphasize his belief that everything his eye falls upon has value and meaning. Yet the most transient expression of the human face never escapes him one has only to see the bitter disappointment of the twice-abandoned "wife."