Tokyo Twilight (1957)
Directed by Yasujirô Ozu

Film Review

Aware that his studio, Shochiku, was switching to colour in 1958, director Yasujiro Ozu intended that his final black-and-white feature would be one that fully exploited the artistic potential of the medium. It is fitting that Tokyo Twilight, the grimmest of Ozu's post-WWII films, should have the look and feel of a film noir, the harsh, high-contrast lighting emphasising the brutality meted out to the central protagonist, a vulnerable young woman scarred by the failure of her parents' marriage.  An aura of fatalistic despair hangs over the film, and there are passages (such as the excursions into the smog-shrouded backstreets of Tokyo) that are hauntingly evocative of French poetic realist films of the 1930s, most notably Marcel Carné's Quai des brumes (1938).

The film's pessimistic tone was presumably fuelled by its director's increasing disillusionment with the social trends that had taken place in Japan since the end of the war - in particular the decreasing importance of the family unit.  In Tokyo Story (1953), Ozu wryly observed how the bond between parents and children ceases to have any tangible quality once the children have left home and started to lead independent lives.  Tokyo Twilight goes one step further and shows families in crisis even before the children have reached adolescence.  One dysfunctional family gives rise to another, and a wayward daughter is forced to have an abortion when she becomes pregnant outside marriage.  Unusually for Ozu, the film has nothing to offer in the way of light relief and just becomes bleaker and bleaker, culminating in a tragedy that seems to be inescapable.

In common with the director's previous film, Early Spring (1956), Tokyo Twilight shows the influence of American melodrama through its inclusion of such popular themes as adultery and abandonment, a concession that Ozu had to make to popular tastes at the time.  However, it also fits within Ozu's series of 'home dramas', convincingly presenting the complex relationship between family members - here a father and his two daughters, each of whom is visibly affected by the absence of the mother.  The strained relationship between parents and children - already powerfully explored in Tokyo Story - attains even more tragic proportions here as the characters find it virtually impossible to communicate with one another.  The burning resentment that Akiko feels for the mother who abandoned her when she was a toddler is a sufficient stimulus to drive her to her doom, and even the older and wiser Takako seems to find it hard to forgive her parents for the break-up of their marriage.

It is a gloomy end to Ozu's run of black-and-white films, Tokyo Twilight being as much a requiem for the traditional family unit as for a style of filmmaking that had become tired and démodé.  Like Shochiku, Ozu would have to learn to move with the times as, like it or not, modern Japan was here to stay.  The death of the fragile Akiko coincides with the death of an ideal that meant a great deal to Ozu but which was no longer a cultural imperative.  By the late 1950s, the family had ceased to be the crucial building block of Japanese society around which everything revolved.  The economic boom had created a new reality in which western-style individualism was to gain ascendancy over the old values and traditions.

Film Synopsis

Shukichi Sugiyama is a senior bank employee who lives in Tokyo with his two grown-up daughters, Akiko and Takako.  It has been many years since Shukichi's wife walked out on him and his daughters to pursue an affair with another man, and now history appears to be repeating itself.  Takako has decided she can no longer cope with her alcoholic husband and has moved back in with her father, taking her infant daughter with her.  Akiko, a college student, has managed to get herself pregnant but her boyfriend, Kenji, avoids her when he hears of this.  Fearful of her father's reaction, Akiko borrows some money from a friend and has an abortion.  Already in a distressed state, Akiko is further perturbed when she encounters a woman who appears to be acquainted with her.  She relates the incident to her older sister, who soon discovers that the woman is their mother...