This is a very odd movie. I guess it’s a romance? It’s set in a hotel right next to a mine, so we’ve got a desolate hotel with almost no guests, booms in the night, and a cast of hotel employees out of Comedy Central Casting.

It’s great!

Ooh! Mysterious stranger!

Tournesols!

Exactly!

This is indeed a very strange movie. It really had something special going on for the first half — that hotel, that mine — but now it’s all dissipated, and instead we’re spending our time at a nearby castle with an insane painter and a smarmy count?

Like er?

I’ve rarely seen a movie take such a hard swerve from being a thing that works to being something that’s more boring than watching gouache dry.

Unfortunately, the movie never recovers from the change of scenery. There’s a bunch of romantic entanglements going on, but none of them are compelling. They’re just… there.

I wonder what happened. It’s almost like the first 40 minutes of this was directed by a quirky but inspired director, and the rest was done by somebody that’s been told to stop messing around and be normal.

The DVD liner notes claims that this movie is “Grémillon most widely admired film”. It was suppressed after a brief run by the Vichy gummint, and I’m wondering whether that has something to do with it. I mean, if a movie has been banned, it automatically gets admirers. On the other hand, I’ve only seen one other film by Grémillon, Remorques, and it quite bad, too, so perhaps “most widely admired” are just weasel words for “Grémillon kinda sucks but this is his least sucky film”?

Finally! The shark!

This is really a ⚁, but the first half hour was special, so:

Summer Light. Jean Grémillon. 1943.

This blog post is part of the Eclipse series.

Heh, this is called Arigatō-san because there’s a bus driver that says arigatō so everybody he passes?

Anyway, I had a hard time watching the previous Shimizu film in this box set just because of technical issues with film stability (OK, it made me nauseous), but this looks fine…

I’m enjoying this a lot already — it seems like it’s really going to be about a bus driver driving around saying arigatō to people? And possibly about the passengers, too.

It’s a low concept movie.

This is lovely — we’re being introduced to all these characters, but there’s no overt plot as such — I think we’re just going to get each character’s mini-melodrama as the film progresses…

This is a really appealing movie. It’s got even less plot going on than I assumed, and I like that a lot. And it’s so un-fusty — the hero of the movie turns out to be the fresh woman who’s plying all the other passengers with likker and insults the old fuddies.

It’s original — I’ve never seen anything quite like this movie. So while it’s not perfect or anything, I really can’t do anything but:

Mr. Thank You. Hiroshi Shimizu. 1936.

This blog post is part of the Eclipse series.

This starts off with half an hour of plot recaps… but I guess that means that this is gonna be a samurai movie instead of another of the disastrous wartime propaganda movies of Kurusawa.

I think this may be a comedy?

Ah, right. This is an er 12th century tale about samurais and stuff, but Kurusawa added the comic porter character that deflates the sombre proceedings all the time. The wartime censors didn’t like that, and apparently so didn’t the American administrative censors, either — this wasn’t released in Japan until 1952.

This looks like it was made on a shoestring budget — they rooted out some old uniforms out of storage, and then filmed everything on a single set? But I mean, it’s amazing that they could make anything at all: This was made in the final days of World War II, after all, and you’d think everybody seen on screen would be out dying somewhere instead?

Well, I can see why both the Japanese and the Americans didn’t want this to be shown — it’s very irreverent. It seems like an over-the-top satire, but it not quite obvious just what it’s making fun of? (Militarism in general, perhaps?) So it’s not something officials would sign off on — just to be on the safe side.

This may well be Kurusawa’s most inspired movie — it’s got several scenes that are actually quite good — but the movie still doesn’t work.

The Men Who Tread on the Tiger’s Tail. Akira Kurosawa. 1945.

This blog post is part of the Eclipse series.

This starts off like many of these late Ozu films — with a bunch of guys around a table talking about nothing much in particular…

So what’s it going to be about this time?

Is it the same group of men as in the previous movie? I mean, Ozu uses the same troupe of actors a lot, so that’s not really significant, but they’re also ragging on the hostess here using similar in-jokes which befuddles her in much the same way as earlier…

I’m pausing to read the DVD liner notes. Be right back!

Ohhh! This is a remake of the much earlier Late Spring film… Sutsuko Hara played the daughter in that movie, and now she plays the mother… How odd. In any case, I haven’t seen Late Spring — it’s not part of this box set — but since Ozu is doing a remake, perhaps he’s knowingly putting in callbacks to other films, too.

Whaa…. that’s exactly the same hallway as in Equinox Flower!

And that’s the same office!

I think the liner notes neglected to mention some stuff.

No, hang on…

Different room number and different colour chairs. So totally different!

Anyway.

This is most amusing. It’s about three middle aged men who’ve somehow gotten it into their minds that they have to find a husband for the daughter of a woman they had a crush on when they were young — and the daughter is not having it at all.

This really is brilliant. Ozu is poking fun at these old guys, but in a good-natured way. It’s kinda touching?

Every scene mixes fun with wistful melancholia (and sometimes some anger at Japanese conservative society, but gently). It’s hard to stop smiling while watching this.

The film kinda takes a turn for fake drama towards the end — I find it in-credible that Ayako would believe that old fogey over her old mother — the film had established Ayoko as a pretty sharp cookie, so that just didn’t work for me.

Man, what a lovely movie. It’s almost kinda perfect — it’s funny (I laughed out loud a few times and kept smiling the rest of the 2:09 running time) and it’s touching, and it doesn’t have a pat ending. It is… dare I say it… even better than Tokyo Story in some ways.

Then again, Tokyo Story packs a bigger emotional wallop than this does. Still:

Late Autumn. Yasujirô Ozu. 1960.

This blog post is part of the Eclipse series.