A Story of Floating Weeds (1934)
A theater troupe lands in a village and the troupe's leader, Kihachi, immediately sets out to find a former girlfriend (mistress? one night stand?) named Otsune, who also happens to be the mother of his illegitimate child. That child, an upstanding and intelligent young man named Shinkichi, is now grown. Kihachi begins to spend a lot of time with Otsune and Shinkichi, and Kihachi's current girlfriend finds out about it and sets out to sabotage the relationship.
The main impression that this film made on me was through its imagery. The image above, in which Kihachi confronts his angry girlfriend as they stand on opposite sides of a street during a rainstorm was perhaps my favorite visual moment. It isn't just pretty to look at--it's a sumptuous visual that also serves as an allegory for the emotional distance and turmoil between the two characters.
The film is full of amazing images and juxtapositions, such as a kettle placed close to the camera, or two characters standing a ways apart from each other on train tracks. The film is also brimming with moments where there are no characters on screen, but merely clues that they have recently been there: an abandoned desk, a still-smoking cigarette, an empty bicycle. There is a feeling of melancholy and "too late" that permeates the whole movie, and every time a character came to see someone only to find an empty chair or an abandoned cup of tea, it hammered home that sad foreboding.
There's a short stretch of the film where it seems as if the point is to villainize the girlfriend, but the film is after more complexity than that. The central characters must all reckon with the effects of their actions, but none more so than Kihachi, whose abandonment of his child and the child's mother (yes, he sends money, but I think we can all agree that parenthood is about more than writing checks) is a reckoning 18 years in the making. Kihachi is a likable character, but there's a selfishness to the way that he does a bunch of "dad" stuff with Shinkichi (he literally take the kid fishing), all while letting the teen think that he's just a friendly uncle. And the film lets you see the hurt in Otsune's face, even as she protests that she doesn't mind basically being a single mother as long as her son is okay. Yes, she loves her son, but she's the one who has had to live a life without romance or sex, and who must maintain the lie to her own son. Kihachi is free to travel and carry on romantic/sexual affairs, to pop in and play dad when he wants and then roll back out of town. Kihachi frequently hits other characters--his girlfriend, another woman from the troupe, even Shinkichi--and it's an anger that seems to be something he is turning from the inside out.
The whole movie is gorgeous and captivating, both visually and from a narrative point of view. Ozu later remade his own film in the 50s, and I look forward to watching the other version.