Ozu's "Tokyo Story", or, what more can be said about Ozu's "Tokyo Story"?

1. The worst thing about canons (other than the obvious) is that, at best, they reduce the title to banality and, at worst, they cheapen it to the point where there is no longer any joy left in it. This is the saddest thing about Ozu's Tokyo Story, which (along with Citizen Kane) is probably one of the most obdurate staples in every imaginable film canon. I watched it with little anticipation, with almost jaded apprehension. I can imagine how it could have blown me away if I had known nothing about it, but as it is it could only feel flat to me, collapsed beneath the weight of all the over-affected adulation. What more can be said about Ozu's Tokyo Story?

2. In an e-mail many years ago, a friend recommended Tokyo Story to me as "another one of those 'slice of life' thingies. They take something very ordinary and make something very extraordinary about them." But imo nothing ordinary at all is taken in Tokyo Story, which is about all the weightiest topics one can possibly think of - love, death, marriage, family, children, grandchildren, loneliness, life and about a disappointment so great that it is no longer tragic - and in this one instance the Japanese have surpassed the Greeks - not worthy even of a bewailing chorus, to be acknowledged only by the quietest of sighs and the saddest of looks.

3. And in that lies the ultimate paradox of Tokyo Story: this is probably one of the most sorrowful films I have ever seen, consistently laced with a searing, knifing disappointment: disappointment with one's children (for Koichi not being a sufficiently prominent doctor, for the children not taking enough time out for the parents); disappointment with one's parents (for the father being a drunk, for upsetting the mother); disappointment with one's marriage (Tomi for having married a husband who drinks heavily, is pig-headed (take the air-pillow episode) and disinterested (his being so dismissive of her not feeling well); Shukishi for having married a wife who is devoted (realised too late!) but a little annoyingly absent-minded); Noriko for having married a man she could never share a life or have children with); disappointment with one's siblings (Kyoko for her siblings leaving so quickly after a funeral, for maneuvering so briskly to procure the dead mother's possessions); disappointment with life, which will never turn out as we had all dreamed and aspired it to. Yet, even in the keenness of that disappointment, there is an even more overwhelming force in the film: a gentleness whose comfort is so compelling it - successfully yet almost apologetically - trumps even that deep disappointment, a gentleness that says softly, "don't cry", even as you bawl all the harder, that points to the river in the mirroring opening and closing shots and says, "look at the river and listen to its lesson, for this, too, shall pass."

4. And, scooped in that gentleness, even I in my jadedness am rocked, am soothed and, astonishedly at its end, am moved. Yes, it still feels flat, but now there is something a little more which I will hold, unspoken, close to my heart. Great is a film which can survive hype; greater is a film, I think, which can survive sycophancy.