Yasujiro Ozu

I'm not sure if my distaste for modern "slice-of-life" movies has to do with them being modern, them being stupid or just the fact that I'm rarely in any sort of sympathy with the motivations and actions of the characters, but I rarely run across a movie about ordinary people that I like at all. There are a few exceptions to that rule, however.

One of my favourite films is Café Lumière. It was made by a Chinese director, Hsiao-hsien Hou, as a tribute to the Japanese filmmaker Yasujiro Ozu. Ozu was known for making movies about ordinary people in ordinary circumstances that beautifully illustrated various aspects of what it means to be human.

I've been watching through the Ozu films Netflix has in chronological order (after starting out of order) and it's amazing what he did with his movies. The people are simple, ordinary and the plots are often exceptionally mundane, but the story leaps off the screen and grabs you by the shirt and forces you to pay attention. Ozu convinces you that the struggles in the lives of his characters are real kinds of problems that could happen and have happened to you and people like you.

These aren't movies for people whose idea of a great movie is Transformers, The Bourne Identity, or even something like Gladiator or Saving Private Ryan. The focus is tight and narrow on the scale of the human family. He had a deft touch that I've not seen matched. Kurosawa was a director equally as good, but he dealt with the macro scale and stories of heroes, nations and wars. Ozu didn't deal with the same topics, but he made his stories feel just as important.