A Film Canon

If Early Spring identified the workplace as the genesis of a new, radically atomized Japanese subjectivity, then Tokyo Twilight considers its implications for the family unit, and the generational narrative around which it is structured. Not only does Ozu present members of the same generation as equally alienated from each other, but he confuses the role of parent and child, to the extent that both mother (Isuzu Yamada) and father (Chishu Ryu) plaintively apologise for the parts they have thrust upon their daughters (Ineko Arima and Setsuko Hara) - a completely unprecedented gesture in his work - who, in turn, are faced with the inability to find in them anything other than a counter-example for their own burgeoning parental careers. This tends to elide the perennial topos of marriage; or, rather, clarifies that it contained and sublimated the entire promiscuous, visceral, abject world, which is now allowed to pervade the film, whether in the form of a series of deliberately provocative asides (an old man compelled to steal underpants, a rail watchman caught 'peeing' at an inopportune moment); the most squalid depiction of Tokyo in Ozu's career, as a smoky, even noirish labyrinth of Ginza bars, Mahjong dens and Pachinko clubs, shot predominantly at night and in the heart of winter; or a tendency towards sensationalism and melodrama that culminates with a stylised hysteria that approaches Mizoguchi in its fascination with the aesthetics of shared female suffering, and finds its epitome in the spectre of abortion that haunts the narrative. Concomitantly, Ozu's sublime gaze is clarified as the mechanism required to resolve, or transcend, inter-generational conflict, if only because that conflict has now been generalised into the more elusive, ambient pessimism that pollutes the metropolis, and ensures that not even the characteristic 180-degree conversational editing can recover the dialectic between Ryu's eyes and Hara's smile, now respectively enveloped in the giant spectacles that mark the entrance to the red-light district, and the first appearance of a smog mask in Ozu's career.