Ozu's Ohayo (Good Morning) (1959)
I have been totally digging Ozu's films lately. I found Early Spring to be a masterpiece and even slight misses (Equinox Flower)are very good.
Taken together, the films that Ozu made in the postwar period examine the changes in Japanese society through the lenses of industrial and postindustrial work, gender roles and marriage, lifestyles including houses and clothing, parent-child relations, food and the rise of the urban (and less urban) middle class.
Good Morning fits well into this tradition, most carefully examining an emerging middle class that buys appliances and spoils their increasingly assertive children even as stay-at-home mothers still dress in kimonos, fathers continue to be dictatorial and stern and parents resist the televisions that their children so crave. In this film, there is no question of miai or resistance to marriage for love; Ozu's Japan has evolved enough that it is assumed that the generation born in the 1930s will marry for love. It is also a world where English has become a an educational commodity that middle class parents acquire for their children.
Good morning is also helped by one of the world's cutest children. While this can be really annoying in many films, this particular little boy provides comic relief while emphasizing that the naughty behavior of the children is not just adolescent rebellion but a true change in how children respected (and disrespected) parents, grandparents and teachers. This is something that would have seen very familiar to parents in the 1959 audiences while it may have outraged Ozu's generation (the director was born in 1903).
Still, I never have the sense that Ozu is opposing change. Sometimes he just points it out; sometimes there is simultaneous nostalgia for the past and criticism of traditions. He seems to have been ambivalent in regards to his subjects. This film, for instance, is sympathetic and tender toward the misbehaving children even as it is not decisive on the subject of the television. Those who oppose the television are clearly seen as old-fashioned as they resist the inevitable, but they are also seen as kind of right in their fears of creating a generation of zombies.
I highly recommend this and all of Ozu's films.
Taken together, the films that Ozu made in the postwar period examine the changes in Japanese society through the lenses of industrial and postindustrial work, gender roles and marriage, lifestyles including houses and clothing, parent-child relations, food and the rise of the urban (and less urban) middle class.
Good Morning fits well into this tradition, most carefully examining an emerging middle class that buys appliances and spoils their increasingly assertive children even as stay-at-home mothers still dress in kimonos, fathers continue to be dictatorial and stern and parents resist the televisions that their children so crave. In this film, there is no question of miai or resistance to marriage for love; Ozu's Japan has evolved enough that it is assumed that the generation born in the 1930s will marry for love. It is also a world where English has become a an educational commodity that middle class parents acquire for their children.
Good morning is also helped by one of the world's cutest children. While this can be really annoying in many films, this particular little boy provides comic relief while emphasizing that the naughty behavior of the children is not just adolescent rebellion but a true change in how children respected (and disrespected) parents, grandparents and teachers. This is something that would have seen very familiar to parents in the 1959 audiences while it may have outraged Ozu's generation (the director was born in 1903).
Still, I never have the sense that Ozu is opposing change. Sometimes he just points it out; sometimes there is simultaneous nostalgia for the past and criticism of traditions. He seems to have been ambivalent in regards to his subjects. This film, for instance, is sympathetic and tender toward the misbehaving children even as it is not decisive on the subject of the television. Those who oppose the television are clearly seen as old-fashioned as they resist the inevitable, but they are also seen as kind of right in their fears of creating a generation of zombies.
I highly recommend this and all of Ozu's films.
posted by Ryan at 5:11 AM
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