Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: 11/22/17

A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Wednesday, November 22, 2017

The Flavor of Green Tea Over Rice (Yasujiro Ozu, 1952)

Koji Tsuruta and Shin Saburi in The Flavor of Green Tea Over Rice

Mokichi Satake: Shin Saburi
Taeko Satake: Michiyo Kogure
Noboru Okada: Koji Tsuruta
Setsuko Yamauchi: Keiko Tsushima
Aya Amamiya: Chikage Awashima
Sadao Hirayama: Chishu Ryu
Chizu Yamauchi: Kuniko Miyake
Naosuke Yamauchi: Eijiro Yanagi
Toichiro Amamiya: Hisao Toake

Director: Yasujiro Ozu
Screenplay: Kogo Noda, Yasujiro Ozu
Cinematography: Yuharu Atsuta
Art direction: Tatsuo Hamada
Music: Ichiro Saito

Yasujiro Ozu's The Flavor of Green Tea Over Rice begins like a 1950s American TV sitcom in which Lucy and Ethel try to pull a fast one over Ricky. In this case, Lucy is Taeko Satake, who wants to get away for a day with Ethel, or Aya Amamiya, at a resort spa without letting Ricky, or Mokichi Satake, know what she's up to. So Taeko decides to tell Mokichi that her niece has fallen ill at a class reunion and she needs to go tend to her. But just as she's about to depart, the niece, Setsuko, drops by the Satake home, so Taeko has to swiftly come up with a Plan B. What we are in for, obviously, is a comedy of marital errors. The Satakes have no children and their marriage has grown stale, which provides an object lesson for Setsuko, whose parents are pressuring her into an arranged marriage and have set up a meeting with the potential groom. Seeing that not only do Taeko and Mokichi have no passion in their lives but Aya is also insouciant about the extramarital affairs of her husband, Toichiro, Setsuko is determined not to fall into their trap. Where Ozu excels is in the presentation of the texture of his characters' lives -- Taeko with her gossipy friends, Mokichi with his daily office grind followed by visits to bars and pachinko parlors, sometimes with his young friend Noboru, whom Mokichi is helping get a start in life after Noboru graduates from college. (There's a wonderful little moment when a slightly inebriated Noboru sings "Gaudeamus Igitur.") At one pachinko parlor, Mokichi discovers that the owner is an old army buddy, Sadao, played by Ozu regular Chishu Ryu, whose chief role in the film is to provide a note of nostalgia for the more adventurous days during the war. Escaping from the meeting with her prospective groom, Setsuko joins Mokichi at the parlor, where she also meets Noboru, and we see a potential relationship spark between the two young people. But when Taeko learns that Mokichi has met with Setsuko when she should have been at the matchmaking session, she's furious and refuses to speak to her husband. Eventually, the crisis is resolved in a lovely scene in which Taeko and Mokichi begin to resolve their marital problems while raiding the larder after the maid has gone to bed, though the film ends with Setsuko and Noboru having what looks like their first fight. Ozu's bittersweet little comedy is sometimes dismissed as a minor work by a master director, but the mastery is very much in evidence.