A Story of Floating Weeds (1934)
Directed by Yasujirô Ozu

Film Review

A Story of Floating Weeds (a.k.a. Ukikusa monogatari) was the first film directed by Yasujirô Ozu that, to western eyes at least, is recognisably Japanese.  If we overlook Ozu's first film (the low-grade period drama Blade of Penitence (1927) which he was unable to complete), his previous films - an eclectic mix of college-based comedies, American-style gangster films and Hollywood-scented melodramas - all bear the imprint of Ozu's heroes in western cinema and employ many of the visual motifs that are alien to traditional Japanese culture.  In A Story of Floating Weeds, virtually all of the characters wear traditional Japanese garments rather than western substitutes and behave as we would expect Japanese characters to behave, instead of looking like Oriental imitations of stock characters in a Hollywood movie.  It is also one of the few films made by Ozu that is not located in his beloved Tokyo.  There's a bizarre irony in the fact that one of the reasons why the West was so late in discovering Ozu's work was because the company that distributed his films believed he was 'too Japanese' to be appreciated by a western audience.  Few Japanese filmmakers were influenced to the extent that Ozu was by western cinema, and even a film as quintessentially Japanese as A Story of Floating Weeds was adapted from an American film, George Fitzmaurice's film The Barker (1928).

A Story of Floating Weeds represents an important milestone in Ozu's career, for a number of reasons.  First, it was the third film in a row made by Ozu which won the prestigious Kinema Junpo Award for best film, an achievement that cemented his reputation as one of Japan's leading film directors.  Second, and more crucially, it seems to mark a definite break with what went before, departing from the comic-tragic diptych structure that had prevailed in earier Ozu films and carrying a more sustained mood of seriousness (lightened occasionally by a few comic incidents).  The characters are more fully developed, more convincingly portrayed, their feelings and anxieties interiorised rather than played out for exaggerated theatrical effect.  The film is a prelude to the great films that Ozu would subsequently make, films that are increasingly preoccupied with the complexities of human relationships, particularly those within a domestic setting. 

The kabuki troupe that features in A Story of Floating Weeds is a substitute for the close-knit families that would appear in later Ozu films, with the exception that the members of the troupe are bound to one another by far less tenuous bonds than that of a blood relationship.  The cross-generational conflict we see here is something that would be played out again and again in Ozu's subsequent 'home dramas', and the relationships between the romantically-linked characters have a typically ironic Ozu-esque edge to them.  Central to the drama is the fraught relationship between the main character Kihachi and his grown-up son Shinkichi.

Unwilling to give up his profession as a travelling actor, Kihachi refused to accept the responsibilities of fatherhood and allowed Shinkichi to believe that his father led a respectable profession and is now dead.  Kihachi knows that his son will despise and reject him if he ever discovers the truth, so he plays the part of the benevolent uncle, visiting his son when he chooses.  It is a scenario that is reminiscent of Ozu's previous film, Passing Fancy (1933), in which another character named Kihachi (played by the same actor, Takeshi Sakamoto) tries and fails to gain his son's respect.  A father's failure to live up his son's expectations is one of the recurring themes of Ozu's oeuvre, and no doubt derived from the director's own difficult relationship with his father, whom he hardly saw from the age of ten. 

The importance of A Story of Floating Weeds to Ozu is betrayed by his decision to remake it in 1959 as Floating Weeds.  This was the second of only two films that Ozu was minded to remake, the other being I Was Born, But... (1932), which was reworked as Good Morning (1959).  A sumptuous colour masterpiece, Floating Weeds was made at Daiei, one of the rare occasions where Ozu worked away from the company to which he devoted his entire career, Shochiku.  Although Floating Weeds is one of Ozu's major accomplishments, regarded by some as his greatest film, it has a very different character from almost all of his other work, and it can be argued that the arresting power of its visuals serves merely to distract us from the more essential elements of Ozu's craft.   A Story of Floating Weeds is far less visually striking than its glossy remake but it bears Ozu's unique signature more clearly, its strength lying not in the cinematography but in the extraordinarily moving performance from its lead actor, Takeshi Sakamoto.  Not even Ozu could ever again match the excruciating sense of loss that is conveyed by Sakamoto in those bitterly cruel scenes towards the end of the film where Kihachi realises he has lost his son forever and begins to see the stark emptiness of the future ahead of him.  Is this what Ozu wished for his own father?  Maybe.

Film Synopsis

A kabuki troupe, led by the ageing actor Kihachi Ichikawa, arrives in a small seaside town.  Without telling anyone, Kihachi takes the opportunity to visit a former mistress of his, Otsune, who bore him a son many years ago and now runs a restaurant.  The son, Shinkichi, has grown up under the impression that his father was a civil servant who died some time ago, and is now a promising student.  Kihachi cannot bear to tell his son the truth and leads him to think he is an uncle.  When she learns that Kihachi has been secretly visiting another woman, Otaka, his present mistress and member of his troupe, becomes jealous and calls on Otsune.  Fearing that his secret may soon come out, Kihachi rails against Otaka and tells her that their engagement is over.  Otaka takes her revenge by bribing a younger actress, Otoki, to make romantic overtures to Shinkichi.  In the ensuing imbroglio, Shinkichi discovers his father's identity and rejects him.  His spirit broken, Kihachi disbands his troupe and decides to leave town alone by the next train.  Otaka is not ready to let him go...