Floating Weeds and Double Lives
March 13, 2007
Yasujiro Ozu's two versions of Floating Weeds, packaged together by Criterion, turn out to be a fine way to survey the work of this director. A Story of Floating Weeds is a silent film from 1934. The story centers on the leader of the troupe who has a former lover and a grown son in the town. For a while he succeeds in spending time with this "family" and strengthening the bond with his son. But like some American film noir, he cannot escape his past.. and his son starts up a relationship with one of the women in the troupe.. something the father cannot allow since he wants his son to become a great man.
Floating Weeds (briefly reviewed here) is Ozu's 1959 remake of this same film. The story is the same as described above. His re-use of this story allows us to get an unusual view of his stylistic development. We get something similar from watching the 1934 and 1956 versions of Alfred Hitchcock's The Man Who Knew Too Much. (Could Ozu have been responding to Hitchcock by remaking a film he had made in 1934? Could he have been fascinated by the formal challenge of such a remake?)
By 1959 the stylistic features that are evident in Ozu's earlier version have become settled. His method of using still-lifes in transitions and carefully composed scenes has assumed a dominant place in his work in the later film. It strikes me as a useful example of the way style can constitute a temptation for an artist.. the inner push always being to let what is most striking about an individual style grow more pronounced. Having seen the lightness with which Ozu could move through the story of Floating Weeds in 1934, the later version feels somewhat mannered.
The Criterion set allows for this kind of comparison between films by the same director. But as with my last two reviews of films by Ozu I think he is coming into focus for me as I compare him with works by other directors. My most recent accidental film mashup comes from my viewing of The Double Life of Veronique by Krzysztov Kieslowski.
It is possible immediately to group them together as humanistic directors. Ozu is patient with each of his characters and at no point does it seem that the director is delivering a punishment to people he does not like. In Floating Weeds both the leader of the troupe and the son are treated with respect. A break develops between them, but Ozu is hardly there to assign right and wrong.. he is a documenter of dissolution, not a moralist. Kieslowski is likewise not interested in judging characters. They act, they hurt others, they find peace.. and his special strength is in giving his character space to grow internally. That internal space is how I would define a humanistic director.. and to get at that internal space the director will often find it convenient to displace plot and move toward a slower paced film.
If I had to locate a major area of difference between Ozu and Kieslowski it would be in the latter's international sensibility. The two Veroniques that make up the double plot of Kieslowski's film are located in Poland and France. The movie calls attention to dependencies and alliances that move past borders.. even for two young women who never knew each other. This kind of spatial orientation brings about a more adventurous approach to telling a story. There is something about Ozu's resolutely local viewpoint that keeps the story telling grounded in linear events. For Kieslowski, whose films are interested in human parallels across spatial divides, story telling becomes fractured and suggestive.
