Koji Tsuruta and Shin Saburi in The Flavor of Green Tea Over Rice (Yasujiro Ozu, 1952)
Cast: Shin Saburi, Michiyo Kogure, Koji Tsuruta, Keiko Tsushima, Chikage Awashima, Chishu Ryu, Kuniko Miyake, Eijiro Yanagi, Hisao Toake. 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 (Michiyo Kogure), who wants to get away for a day with Ethel, or Aya Amamiya (Chikage Awashima), at a resort spa without letting Ricky, or Mokichi Satake (Shin Saburi), 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 (Keiko Tsushima), 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 (Hisao Toake), 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 (Koji Tsuruta), 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.
3 notes
·
View notes
第4回 2013 年 12 月6 日
会場:仙台 Club ADD
出演者:
・佐藤実 minoru sato m/s - ライブ
・佐藤貴宏 - ライブ
・菊地良博 - ライブ
・mamafufu - ライブ
・DJ まつたけの花 aka 浜田まさるの晩ごはん | DJ Victory - DJ
・DJ 佐分利信 | DJ Saburi Shin - DJ
・DJ ステーキハウスによる肉食怪獣劇場 - DJ
固定メンバーがライブ演奏を、またそれぞれが変名でDJ を行った。
まつたけの浜 DJ 録音:
https://hidoievent.tumblr.com/post/82008299669/just-uploaded-%E3%81%BE%E3%81%A4%E3%81%9F%E3%81%91%E3%81%AE%E8%8A%B1-aka
0 notes
Yoko Tsukasa, Setsuko Hara, Ryuji Kita, Shin Saburi, and Nobuo Nakamura in Late Autumn (Yasujiro Ozu, 1960)
Cast: Setsuko Hara, Yoko Tsukasa, Mariko Okada, Shin Saburi, Nobuo Nakamura, Ryuji Kita, Keiji Sada, Chishu Ryu. Screenplay: Kogo Noda, Yasujiro Ozu, based on a novel by Ton Satomi. Cinematography: Yuharu Atsuta. Production design: Tomiji Shimizu. Film editing: Yoshiyasu Hamamura. Music: Takanobu Saito.
It's possible to think of 1960 as a kind of watershed year in Japanese film, with the appearance of two such radically different films as Nagisa Oshima's The Sun's Burial and Yasujiro Ozu's Late Autumn. The contrast between the lurid chaos of Oshima's underworld and the strict geometry (of both style and morals) of Ozu's middle classes couldn't be sharper. I imagine some alien intelligence on a distant planet intercepting transmissions of both films and wondering that they could possibly come from the same world, let alone the same country (and even the same film studio, Shochiku). Ozu was of course an established master, whereas Oshima was beginning a career -- with a bang, it should be said, making three feature films that year. The razzle-dazzle of The Sun's Burial was long behind Ozu, if it was ever really in his cinematic vocabulary. But both films speak to the restless undercurrents in Japanese postwar society, Oshima's by confronting the disorder and corruption, Ozu's by slyly examining the breakup of stifling traditions in the Japanese family. Both end with solitary women, the gangster-prostitute Hanako in The Sun's Burial and the empty-nest mother Akiko (Setsuko Hara) in Late Autumn, confronting loneliness. But if Hanako has a counterpart in Ozu's film, it's really the feisty Yuriko (Mariko Okada), the representative of the younger generation who sorts out all the tangled threads that the meddling older generation has gotten snared in. At this point I feel the comparisons getting strained, but it's always fun to let differing films sort themselves out.
2 notes
·
View notes