Originally Ozu wanted to make Floating Weeds with Shochiku, the studio where he was under contract. Masaichi Nagata, the President of Daiei, had invited Ozu earlier to direct a film there; since Ozu had finished up his annual quota for Shochiku that year, he seized the opportunity to make the film with Daiei instead. The script was a remake of one of his silent features, The Story of Floating Weeds (Ukigusa Monogatari, 1934). At first he wanted to title the remake The Ham Actor (Daikon Yakusha, literally "radish actor") but he ended up staying with Floating Weeds. Ozu and his regular scriptwriter Kogo Noda had set this new script in the winter, but by the time shooting began Ozu moved the location to the seaside, the Kii peninsula in southern Japan. Ozu and Noda also changed some of the incidental plot details to reflect the new setting. The silent version contains somewhat more earthy humor than the remake, though the remake is by no means devoid of comic touches, such as the image of the boy stopping to urinate in an alley during the actors' procession through the streets, or the woman with the toothsome smile who flirts with one of the Kabuki actors. In an interview Ozu said, "Though this is a contemporary film, in mood it really belongs to the Meiji period. It could have been filmed that way, too, but that would have meant going to all the trouble of getting the costumes, the manners, and so on, just right."
A legendary drinker, Ozo liked to stay up late drinking whisky or sake with Noda as they hashed out story ideas and dialogue. This was true regardless of whether they were frequenting bars in Tokyo or staying at Ozu's mountain retreat. The film scholar Donald Richie notes that in Ozu's diary entry for July 7, 1959 he wrote: "If the number of cups you drink be small, there can be no masterpiece; the masterpiece arises from the number of brimming cups you quaff. It's no coincidence that this film [Floating Weeds] is a masterpiece -- just look in the kitchen at the row of empty bottles."
Producing Floating Weeds at Daiei meant that Ozu worked with a different cast and crew than his regulars at Shochiku, though he did bring along Chishu Ryu, one of his favorite actors. The lead actor Ganjiro Nakamura (Komajuro) later worked with Ozu again in The End of Summer (1961). Machiko Kyo (Sumiko), one of Daiei's leading actresses, had appeared in numerous films by Kenji Mizoguchi and Kon Ichikawa, as well as Kurosawa's Rashomon (1950). Nakamura later recalled that the notoriously perfectionistic Ozu required the two actors to spend an entire day in the rain filming one scene, and that both of them fell ill afterwards.
The most important new member on the production team was undoubtedly Kazuo Miyagawa, who had worked with Kyo and Nakamura earlier in the same year on Kon Ichikawa's adaptation of the controversial Junichiro Tanizaki novel The Key; that film was released in the U.S. under the title Odd Obsession (1959). At the time Miyagawa was easily Japan's greatest living cinematographer, having worked not only with Kurosawa on Rashomon but also with Mizoguchi on the masterpieces Ugetsu Monogatari (1953) and Sansho the Bailiff (1954). In an interview Ozu stated: "Miyagawa went to lots of trouble and experimented a good deal with this film. I began to understand just what a color picture is. For example, you must give the right kind of lighting to a certain color to make it look on film the way it does to the eye. If you shoot two different colors with the same lighting, one of them won't come out, and so you have to decide from the beginning which color you don't want." In the same interview Ozu declared that he refused altogether to work in CinemaScope, which was starting to become popular in Japan at that time, preferring the standard aspect ratio and a more rapid cutting style. He said of Floating Weeds, "This film must have more cuts in it than any other recent Japanese movie."
While Floating Weeds is not exactly the type of domestic drama which Ozu usually made and it has a relatively lush visual style compared to most of Ozu's later films, it still displays the characteristic rigor of the director's mature style: low, sometimes floor-level camera placement, static camera setups, various red objects arranged as decorative elements within shots, doors and windows employed to break up the space visually with internal frames, and characters facing the camera directly during dialogue exchanges. Indeed, Ozu has one of the most consistent and immediately identifiable visual styles in all of cinema. For those who have never seen an Ozu film, Floating Weeds offers a captivating introduction to his world.
Director: Yasujiro Ozu
Script: Kogo Noda and Yasujiro Ozu
Director of Photography: Kazuo Miyagawa
Art Director: Tomoo Shimogawara
Music: Kojun Saito
Cast: Ganjiro Nakamura (Komajuro Arashi), Machiko Kyo (Sumiko); Ayako Wakao (Kayo); Hiroshi Kawaguchi (Kiyoshi Homma); Haruko Sugimura (Oyoshi); Hitomi Nozoe (Aiko); Chishu Ryu (Theater owner); Koji Mitsui (Kichinosuka); Haruo Tanaka (Yatazo).
C-119m.
by James Steffen
Sources:
Richie, Donald. Ozu. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974.
Bordwell, David. Ozu and the Poetics of Cinema. London: BFI, 1988.
