Tokyo Twilight – Tôkyô Boshoku (1957)

Directed by: Yasujirô Ozu | 140 minutes | drama | Actors: Setsuko Hara, Ineko Arima, Chishû Ryû, Isuzu Yamada, Teiji Takahashi, Masami Taura, Haruko Sugimura, Sô Yamamura, Kinzô Shin, Kamatari Fujiwara, Nobuo Nakamura, Seiji Miyaguchi

On the occasion of the 100th anniversary (1920 – 2020) of the Japanese film studio Shochiku, comparable to Hollywood studios such as United Artists and MGM, Eye Filmmuseum has set up a program with films from this Japanese production stable. Eye shows works by master directors Masaki Kobayashi (‘The Human Condition’ I, II and III, 1959-61) and Takeshi Kitano (‘Sonatina’, 1993) among others. Also producer Shochiku was known for the genre shoshimingeki. These were domestic dramas with Japanese star actors, mainly aimed at a female audience. Shochiku had a master in this genre: Yasujirō Ozu (1903 – 1963). Eye has programmed four Ozu classics, ‘The Flavor of Green Tea over Rice’ (1952), ‘Tokyo Story’ (1953), ‘Early Spring’ (1956) and ‘Tokyo Twilight’ (1957). In contrast to his contemporary and professional colleague Akira Kurosawa, Ozu received recognition from the foreign public especially after his death, culminating in the election of ‘Tokyo Story’ as the best film of all time by the British film magazine ‘Sight and Sound’ in 2012.

Besides the habit of pointing his camera at domestic scenes, Ozu was equally known for his minimalist film style which he developed over his 35-year career. During one scene, the quirky Ozu barely moved the camera and filmed from unusually low camera angles. In addition, Ozu often used elliptical transitions. This concerns abrupt transitions in the story through editing. For example, Ozu doesn’t show a wedding or a serious accident that happens to a main character, but it does show events before and after. This minimalistic approach takes some getting used to from the viewer. However, don’t let this scare you away, because it won’t take long before you’re bobbing in the serene rhythm of this unique style.

Four years after the release of the now widely acclaimed ‘Tokyo Story’, the lesser-known ‘Tokyo Twilight’ appeared. At its core, the story revolves around the Sugiyama family, consisting of two sisters, the married Takako and the unmarried student Akiko, and their father, banker Shukichi. In a detour they learn that their long-lost mother and wife are still alive somewhere. This hits like a bomb, especially with younger daughter Akiko. Incidentally, this is only a small preview of the drama that the Sugiyama family is experiencing.

Although many of Ozu’s films are not light fare, ‘Tokyo Twilight’ is quite dramatic on a dramatic level. The density of drama is exceptionally high and seems like an accumulation of all the post-war worries Ozu had about the desired stable family life: motherlessness; violence against children; alcoholism; gambling addiction; parting; abortion (abortion has been legal in Japan since 1948, in the Netherlands since 1984) and that’s not all. The filming of the jam-packed script even led to a short-lived rift between Ozu and his regular screenwriter Kôgo Nodam, who had worked together almost continuously since 1927 on productions for film producer Shochiku.

Despite the amount of dramatic vicissitudes, Ozu continues to search for nuance in the tragic life of the Sugiyama family. Father Shukichi remains remarkably stoic under all the suffering. Every day he toils on and embraces fate. However, the daughters do not give up and refuse to watch in silence, and do not shy away from confrontation. Thus the sisters rise up against their father, or sister against sister, or a daughter against estranged mother. Still, ‘Tokyo Twilight’ doesn’t blame anyone. Every family member has his fateful share in the misery, but also mitigating solutions for it.

At the crux, ‘Tokyo Twilight’ forms a circle that is full of reflections between characters, such as the eldest daughter Takako who leaves her husband with a toddler and her own mother who left the family when Takako was a toddler herself. In addition, a battle between modernity and tradition in Japan runs like a deep red line through the film, evident from Akiko’s heartbreaking trials alone. However, Ozu doesn’t choose one over the other. As a split personality, modernity and tradition share the stage in his Japan and there is acceptance that visibly opposing forces are doomed to each other.

The American director and screenwriter Paul Schrader, known for his ‘Taxi Driver’ (Martin Scorsese, 1976) among other things, classifies Ozu’s later work, together with films by the Danish director Carl Theodor Dreyer and the Frenchman Robert Bresson, as transcendental cinema. This is cinema that elicits a maximum, almost spiritual, reaction from the audience with minimal means, including understated acting. Moreover, Schrader considers Ozu a master of zero time, a time when apparently nothing happens. His films make you reflect on what happened in that kind of ‘between moments’ in a charming way.

In retrospect, ‘Tokyo Twilight’ is a bit of an outsider in Ozu’s oeuvre, not so much visually, but in the amount of social misery that engulfs the protagonists. Danish director Lars von Trier would bounce. With this story, Ozu found himself on the brink of falling darkness, leaning over a bottomless pit. Yet the film does not derail into unbearable melodrama, even if only slightly, and that is due to the emotional, nuanced look at family life and the minimalist film approach. Ozu’s film style is therefore still striking in a cinema landscape, and wider popular visual culture, which, both today and then, is dominated by constant mobility, action after reaction, and little room for reflection.