My first brush with the audience for Film Forum’s Ozu retrospective was a trip. I got off on the wrong block and ran into another Ozu-er who was lost too. As we found our way around the block to the theatre, he told me he saw Tokyo Story when he was teenager, which led him (eventually) to spend decades in Japan where he got married. His Japanese wife met us at the theater.
Movies teach you how to live. Per Jean Eustache — another auteur who deserves his summer retro in NYC (currently at Lincoln Center). I’m glad Film Forum gave Ozu his due, but the programmer responsible for the screening I saw made a mess of it. The showing of Ozu’s 1959 color remake of his Floating Weeds opened with a bad black and white print of a 25-minute film, Kagamijishi, devoted to a Kabuki dance performance from the 30s. There was elegance on view as the masterly male dancer made himself over into an ingenue and, then, into a lion. But the film (made by a young Ozu) was pretty stiff. It took me back to what I recall as the mid-Atlantic, Mah-sterpiece Theater era at PBS. (Before public tv began relying on 20th C. pop moves tuned to boomers?) Kagamijishi’s tone made it deeply inapt as a prologue since Floating Weeds is anything but toney (even if it’s as subtle as the next Ozu). While it’s true Floating Weeds is about a theater troupe, they’re not out to skill anyone and the film is more about their grabby lives than their silly shows. (Forgive me for musing that Cocksucker Blues would’ve made a better double-bill with Floating Weeds than Kagamijishi.) The distance between Ozu’s tribute to urbane Kabuki theater and his film about a troupe of poor — in both senses of the term — actors (led by a ham-in-chief) is brought near in Floating Weeds‘ opening scene. A working class guy in a beach-town – who’s in the troupe’s target audience – recalls the highlight of a prior company’s season as he spells out his idea of summer theater: “that dancer with a red dress and fat ass.”
But I wonder if his line came through. I sensed Kagamijishi might have had a soporific effect on the Film Forum audience when one of my companions – an Indian woman who’s the wife of an American friend – began to laugh out loud once the floating weeds landed on stage in a costume drama. I was smiling too, and I should’ve laughed with her in solidarity as Ozu zeroed in on a blaring trio from the troupe who tried to top each other like Oriental Guilfoyles. But my Indian friend was on her own as she cavorted with Ozu. And I’m putting the blame (in part) on that damn programmer whose opening gambit seemed to have dead-assed the audience, prepping them (and me?) to take an overly reverent stance toward Ozu’s feature.
My friend’s solo glee reminded me of a moment, thirty years ago, when I went on a laughing jag by myself at Walter Reade Theater — another institutional art house. I lost it at Bleak Moments — slain by Mike Leigh’s comic rhythms in a scene where a dim folkie wows/woos a mentally challenged teen who brings a late Arbus-like mien to the screen. This is early Leigh, though, and his Bleak Moments — can you imagine the cussedness that made him go for that unmarketable title? — don’t carry Arbus’s dread. (There’s no implication that under one genocidal 20 C. regime its intellectually impaired characters would once have been imperiled just like Arbus’s or Leigh’s ancestors.)
Floating Weeds is a comedy too. The finish is magnificently unsentimental. Ozu teases a possible reconstitution of a family broken by the theater troupe’s paltry impresario who’s been a kind of genteel rolling stone committed to an actor’s life. But in the end, there’s no settling down or grand reconciliations. And no tragedy either. The anti-heroic protagonist ends up back on the road and back together with the thespian woman he’d been living with for years, not with the mother of his son (whom he’d been content to play uncle with).
Ozu isn’t judgmental and Floating Weeds isn’t a testament to the need for roots. There are souls – not the shallowest among us – who are meant to keep moving. I was struck, though, by a passing comment made by my pal who’d laughed her way around Film Forum’s pieties. She mentioned, in a post-screening dinner chat, she didn’t have much use for nationalism. It occurred to me her (relative) freedom from nation/custom might have something to do with her straight-on response to Ozu’s delightful disrespect for bad actors. (Not that my own howling at Bleak Moments was a hint I’d become a “globalist” without boundaries. It’s just what happens when you come from a big, loud family. You can’t take us anywhere.)
My dinner companion’s disavowal of nationalism stuck with me, though, as I thought back on Ozu’s work and Leigh’s (and Eustache’s). Their films, like most good art, are founded on their sense of place and clarity about national structures of feeling. But it’s not just art that rests on closely imagined nations.[1] Politics starts for real, for real at home too, even if it shouldn’t end there. Check Fredric Smoler’s piece on Liberal Nationalism in this issue or Karen Gut’s Israelis in the street or the Ukrainian doctors hardening at work in “Nation Time.” I’m with them (in my head) though I also want to be on the side of natural-born internationalists who trust their own sense of the ridiculous.
Note
1 I can think of one art film that succeeds in part due to the director’s self-aware refusal to live and abide by a national culture. Abbas Kiarostami’s Like Falling in Love is set in Japan, but it’s a universal fable that (astonishingly) never seems irreal. Kiarostami’s film manages to take in the rise of anti-Western, sado-nativist populism — to see it plain and feelingly: What Happened (Kiarostami in Tokyo & Obama in Johannesburg) – First of the Month.