Ozu's Record of a Tenement Gentleman, 1947. B/w, 72 minutes. Original title "Nagaya Shinshiroku ~ (長屋紳士録 ).
Viewed at the Karlovy Vary Film Festival of 2003. One of the best films seen here that year was a little known Japanese film, in the Ozu retrospective sidebar entitled, "RECORD OF A TENEMENT DWELLER" made just after the war in 1947. This was Ozu's return to filmmaking for Shochiku after four years of military service in China. The film is the story of a simple unmarried woman who is forced, much against her will, to take in a small boy, apparently abandoned in the postwar shattered Tokyo hustle and bustle. After much hostility toward the child, she finally realizes how much he has filled the void in her life and that she in fact loves him -- but only does this realization hit her when the father reappears to repossess his lost child. A simple story so directly told that it sneaks up on you like a time-bomb and makes you realize that your heart was crying -- but only ten minutes after the film is over! An early masterpiece from the master of Zen and the Art of telling stories on film, and an incredibly subtle, yet bombshell, performance by the main actress Chôko Iida, in my book, a retroactive Best Actress Oscar for the year that was. Iida was extremely active in Japanese silent pictures from 1923 on and had already appeared in supporting roles in three prewar Ozu films; "An Inn in Tokyo", (1935) the first version of "Floating Weeds" (1934), and "Dekigoro" (A Passing Fancy, 1933), but this performance when she was already pushing fifty was her acting apotheosis. Unfortunately Ozu's uniquely stylized films were not discovered in the west until after his death in 1963 and are only now becoming recognized little by little in astute cinema circles as the quiet unhurried masterpieces which they are.
