Yasujirō Ozu Mini Season at Showroom Cinema
Tom Grieve, Cinema Editor
Following their dedication to Akira Kurosawa last month, the team at Sheffield’s Showroom highlight the career of another of Japan’s great directors this December. Scheduled as part of the BFI’s Japan 2021 programming, audiences can get acquainted with the work of Yasujirō Ozu, with a three-film mini season that demonstrates his singular, unwavering style. Taken from the filmmaker’s post-war period, these family dramas focus on universal themes of generational conflict, familial strife and the struggle between modernity and tradition, from a distinctly Japanese perspective.
The season starts with 1952’s The Flavour of Green Tea Over Rice (Thursday 16 December), a wry look at the pressures and strains of contemporary marriage, and continues with the director’s 1953 masterpiece, Tokyo Story (Sunday 19 December), in which an aging couple travel to Tokyo to visit their adult children, only to find that they are regarded as a burden. Lastly, a screening of Ozu’s 1951 Early Summer (Wednesday 22 December) exemplifies the simple complexity of his work, as a happy, independent, young woman’s family seek to find her a husband.
