A Film Canon

In his most pessimistic film to date, Ozu replaces the waning paternal authority of Equinox Flower with the television, and draws upon the visceral intensity of Tokyo Twilight to evoke the incursion of American capitalism that it represents. In the process, his marriage narrative is entirely infantilised and commodified, as two young boys go on a hunger and silence strike until their parents unite them with a set. Ironically, this silence brings them closer to the meditative sublimity of Ozu's earlier protagonists, thereby clarifying the extent to which conversational etiquette has been co-opted by business and advertising, reconfiguring his trademark 180-degree conversation around the increasingly omniscient screen, and replacing sublime deindividuation with voyeuristic anonymity: "For children, our greetings may seem like a waste of time." "I do it all the time to sell cars. I have to." "Yes, it acts as a lubricant in this world." Not only does this break down the distinctions between workplace and home, transplanting the banality of the former onto the latter and precluding any need to depict it literally, but it removes male autonomy to the transient spaces between the two - a bar, the railway station, the circuit of a travelling salesman - as well as transforming home itself into plastic, multicoloured American suburbia, with the burden of excretion placed squarely upon the two boys, and the flatulence that they substitute for, or identify with, consumption. The result is Ozu's most delicate interrogation of his own implication in the very modernity he is criticising, and motivation for the proportionately heightened self-discipline that will inform Floating Weeds and his last works.