"A Story of Floating Weeds" (1934)

Yasujiro Ozu’s sound films have the quality of a silent film. They rely on the strength of their imagery and the depths of emotions Ozu plumbs from them. Ozu told simple stories, typically family dramas, with increasingly radical compositions (in most of his films he breaks the 180 degree rule). A Story of Floating Weeds, one of Ozu’s earliest films, is a silent film about the leader of a traveling theater company who returns to visit a former lover and his grown-up illegitimate son, unaware of their biological relationship. The man’s mistress, another member of the troupe, discovers the identity of the son, and grows jealous. She asks a friend to seduce the son, as a way of getting back at her lover and in hopes of breaking apart the family. This becomes further complicated as the woman actually falls for the son as she courts him. The genius of Ozu though is how all of this grows out of recognizable human emotions, and the ways he keeps layering the story with situations that deepen this emotion. Ozu displays what might be called a “formal objectivity”; though it doesn’t have the same rigor of formal discontinuity and distance of his later works, Floating Weeds allows feeling to arise from our observations of these characters and their story. Ozu’s sense of distance only serves to increase our empathy, as we feel more deeply because the film chooses to avoid directing our emotional response.     

Grade: A-