Tokyo Story

To quote my favourite film maker, Wim Wenders: “If our century still has any shrines…if there were any relics of the cinema, then for me it would have to be the corpus of the Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu. Ozu’s films always tell the same simple stories, of the same people, in the same city of Tokyo. They are told with extreme economy, reduced to their barest essentials. His films may be thoroughly Japanese, but they are also absolutely universal. I have seen all the families in the world in them, including my parents, my brother and myself.”

Indeed, I have also seen myself, my own family and my parents in this moving and simply told story. The lack of artifice makes it all the more compelling. It is about how we escape the big truths of life through small talk and mundane busy-ness. We miss sharing our great joys and sadness; instead we talk about the weather. On another level it is about the destruction of the family through work and modernisation.