Every ten years, the prestigious film magazine Sight & Sound selects the best films of all time. In 2022 it was that time again and there was an old friend in the top 10: The Japanese drama The Trip to Tokyo landed in 4th place, right behind the US classic Citizen Kane.
The film by director Yasujiro Ozu is now a regular on best lists. If you’ve never seen the touching family story, there’s no excuse now. Since this week you can in Germany Stream ten Ozu films for free and without adsincluding his masterpiece The Trip to Tokyo (1953).
Why The Trip to Tokyo enjoys such a good reputation
Numerous filmmakers cite the influence of the works of Yasujiro Ozu (1903-1963), including art house greats such as Jim Jarmusch, Wim Wenders and Paul Schrader. Even James Mangold said about his X-Men spin-off Logan – The Wolverine: “I tried to make an Ozu movie with mutants.”
Now you should go to The Journey to Tokyo no broken bones or action scenes expect. The drama is about an older couple (Chishû Ryû and Chieko Higashiyama) who want to visit their children who are successful in life. However, when they arrive in Tokyo, the offspring show a lack of interest. Only her widowed daughter-in-law Noriko (Setsuko Hara) seems human to her seeinstead of just perceiving it as a burden.
Kairos Filmverleih GbR
Trip to Tokyo
In The Journey to Tokyo one opens up painful gap between generations, which even parents find difficult to explain. Should they be proud of their upbringing because the children are getting along in life, or disappointed because they hardly seem to value their own parents? Have they made private mistakes or are they subject to a much larger change of time that is overtaking them and their traditional ideas? In the trip to Tokyo, these questions are raised and answers are suggested, just not easy ones.
With a lot of understatement in the narrative it becomes developed a universally understandable and tangible story, which is at the same time deeply anchored in its culture and the economic miracle of Japan in the 1950s. Which is certainly due to Yasujiro Ozu’s style. The director often arranged his quiet camera angles so that the viewer was sitting next to the characters on the tatami mat that is typical of Japanese rooms. You look the sad parents and their children straight in the face at dinner.
The British film critic Maria Delgado wrote:
A brilliant film about… a changing society what it means to feel like you are no longer needed. Ozu is always the director to turn to when you want to see how you can do more with less – the director of the everyday who combines economy and intensity in extraordinary ways. This is how you can stream one of the best films of all time (and 9 other works worth seeing).
The public broadcaster Arte has made ten of the director’s films available for streaming in the media library, as well as a documentary entitled Ozu, the filmmaker of happiness.
You can now stream these 10 films by Yasujiro Ozu in the Arte media library:
Paul Schrader (The Card Counter) wrote the following about the man Yasujiro Ozu a few years ago:
One might also think that a director who… Films with so much warmth
whose work is permeated with so much happiness and sadness must have had a contented life. The opposite was the case. He was a chain smoker, he was an alcoholic, he lived with his mother… He never married, never had children. He lived for cinema and everything he did was cinema.
Now you have the opportunity to immerse yourself in this life worth seeing with just a few clicks.