Enic-cinE

A visit to Hirata’s home is another example of two-room staging coupled with a small room in the back. This scene echoes the earlier scene at Horikawa’s home when they discussed about Horikawa’s decision to resign his position. While the earlier scene opened with a troubled expression on Hirata’s face, here we have the more jovial smile on his face. Hirata is also a widower, but lives with his daughter (Nami) and young son (Seiichi). The contrast with Horikawa’s father-son relationship is revealing. They are living together, they have a home of their own, and they have their own privacy. …

The space of two neighboring rooms with fusuma in between is the most effectively utilized in this section. Here, the son listened to his father’s decision without any utterance of protest, but his despair and disappointment is apparent visually. The next room has been a void up until this point, then the son moves to the room and sits on tatami quietly, his back toward his father. The distance here is only a few meters in reality, but we feel it more distant than it actually is. This “parent-child” conflict is always a recurring theme of Ozu films. But the …

Sometimes, we find some illogical coincidence among trivial matters in our daily life. If you see the old lady from the next block with her dog in the morning, it’s a bad omen for the day, for example. But if you see a black cat living the next door before you start the car, you will be okey for the day. Maybe the collage kid in the coffee shop signals the bad weather in the afternoon, or something else. No logical connection. It’s just a stupid coincidence you happened to notice. If you take a statistics for such matters, it’s …