The movie that took “small steps against our imperfections”, according to Roger Ebert
Making a career out of watching, analysing, and reviewing movies exposes the critic in question to everything cinema has to offer, and Roger Ebert was just as happy to spotlight the bad and the ugly as he was the good.
While there’s arguably more mileage to be found and publicity to be mined from eviscerating a feature-length abomination and tearing it apart in print – something Ebert was hardly against, given the volume of stinkers that made his personal shit list – it was every bit as easy to tell which films had a profound impact on him on a personal level.
One such title was Yasujirō Ozu’s 1953 masterpiece Tokyo Story, which didn’t make a significant international splash upon its first release. However, greatness has a funny way of transcending barriers, and the movie is now regarded as perhaps the iconic filmmaker’s magnum opus and inarguably one of the finest Japanese motion pictures ever made.
Chishu Ryu and Chieko Higashiyama star as elderly couple Shukishi and Tomi, who embark on a long and arduous journey from their rural seafront home of Onomichi to the bustling urban metropolis of Tokyo to visit their adult children. Sô Yamamura’s doctor, Koichi, and Haruko Sugimura’s hairdresser, Shige, decide they don’t have a lot of free time to spend with their parents, but Setsuko Hara’s daughter-in-law Noriko takes it upon herself to keep them company.
It’s hardly a complex or ambitious narrative, but that doesn’t make it any less powerful. Ebert acknowledged as much in his review, reflecting on how “no story could be simpler” than Tokyo Story, which follows ageing parents going out of their way to reconnect with the grown-up children who can’t make time in their hectic schedules.
“It doesn’t want to force our emotions but to share its understanding,” Ebert explained. “It does this so well that I am near tears in the last 30 minutes. It ennobles the cinema. It says, yes, a movie can help us make small steps against our imperfections.”
Through the universal archetypes of its characters and the broad strokes of the story that are as applicable to society now as it was in the 1950s when it was made, Tokyo Story is both of its time and timeless. Ebert celebrated its exploration of “our families, our natures, our flaws, and our clumsy search for love and meaning”. He had the realisation that “it isn’t that our lives keep us too busy for our families, it’s that we have arranged them to protect us from having to deal with big questions of love, work, and death”, remaining achingly resonant.
It’s impossible to watch Tokyo Story without experiencing an emotional reaction rooted in the viewer’s own personal experiences, which continues to ensure a movie that’s well past its 70th anniversary will always be tethered to whatever modernity’s current version of family dynamics currently are.
