Floating Weeds (Ukigusa)

Screening on Film
Directed by Ozu Yasujiro.
With Nakamura Ganjiro II, Sugimura Haruko, Kyo Machiko.
Japan, 1959, 35mm, color, 119 min.
Japanese with English subtitles.
Print source: Janus Films

A kabuki theater troupe arrives in a seaside town that is not particularly interested in their middling work. Their leader Komajuro—played by kabuki actor Nakamura Ganjiro II—is preoccupied with visiting his son Kiyoshi (Kawaguchi Hiroshi) and Kiyoshi’s mother Oyoshi (Sugimura Haruko), though Kiyoshi still thinks Komajuro is his uncle, and Komajuro’s jealous mistress Sumiko (Kyo Machiko) threatens to reveal his secret. Though there are few changes to the plot itself, there are several differences between Ozu’s A Story of Floating Weeds and the 1959 remake: its production by Daiei rather than Shochiku; its relocation from the mountains to the island of Shijima; and its stunning deep-focus cinematography by the great Miyagawa Kazuo, who filmed Rashomon (1950) and Sansho the Bailiff (1954). More significantly, the film’s structure is loosened by leisurely, sensual lapses. The intensified importance of pleasure turns Ozu’s recurrent question of parentage into a choice: Kiyoshi does not need a father, certainly not a bad one; there are many other ways for a young person to be happy. Ozu applies the same lesson to the toiling actors who follow their selfish leader from one doomed production to another, making the film an impressively exact critique of patriarchal authority in both family and art.
(Description by Kelley Dong)

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