A Story of Floating Weeds on DVD
Max Nineteennineteen
liked Bed and Sofa, you will find this another foreign silent with a
directness in the telling and a frankness about sexual matters that
makes it quite interesting and unusual.
The movie is Yasujiro Ozu's 1934 silent version of A Story of Floating
Weeds, paired in a Criterion set with its better known 1959 remake,
Floating Weeds. Floating Weeds has never been one of my favorite
Ozus, though it's probably among his most accessible ones, being more
melodramatic and less repressed than most of them. An acting troupe
stops in a small village, and the head of the troupe visits a long-ago
lover and his son (who believes his father to have been a dead civil
servant, not a low-class actor), while the father's jealous girlfriend
in the troupe conspires to cause trouble.
The story reputedly is inspired by a 1928 American film, The Barker,
though Ozu is also supposed to have been very impressed by King
Vidor's The Stranger's Return (1933), and there's just enough
similarity in the theme of a bittersweet homecoming and the personal
changes it effects to believe it. Curiously, though this film seems
more directly inspired by Hollywood than other Ozu silents like I Was
Born, But or An Inn at Tokyo, it also seems to be pointing the way
much more clearly to the "Japanese-ness" of his later work, with the
sitting-level compositions and the scene-setting shots of empty rooms
that are the most obvious trademarks of his style. It also has the
kind of parental sacrifice theme that would be the subject of nearly
all his films after a certain point (and which also, of course,
probably reflects the influence of 20s-30s Hollywood movies of the
Stella Dallas type).
The print material Criterion used is superb; the tonal range and
pictorial quality is excellent and there are only occasional blemishes
and jitters in one scene. It is one of the best-looking silent DVDs I
have seen, period. And, you get a nice color movie with it. Check it
out.
Kirk Henderson
silent version, but the color remake was also very effective. The
locales of the silent version were more open and "country," than the
color film, which seemed confined. The '34 silent also has more
movement and screen activity. For example, the scene where the "Uncle"
and son are fishing in the silent version takes place on a swift
riverbank, with the two recasting their lines repeatedly as they talk.
In the color version the same two characters just sit on dockside with
their lines hanging into the sea. What I really liked about the '59
color version was the color itself. The use of red was phenomenal. Did
you notice how every scene was offset by some brilliant red somewhere in
the shot? This could be on a woman's obi of her kimono or red flowers
or a flag graphic or a red bicycle, etc. etc. And the position of red
objects was important too. Red became the color of emotion and love in
the story. By the end of the film, as the train rides away with the two
lovers who have made up, we see the two red tail lights of the train
zoom off. Just perfect. Every shot of that film is exceptional.
Painterly. Compositionally strong. Both films are worth seeing. But
see the silent version first for the story. The comparison of the color
remake will be all the more interesting.