Cinema Can Do Still Lives: Banshun

Mono no aware, the classic Japanese idea of being aware of the inevitable fleetingness of life, forms a common thread running through many of the films by Yasujiro Ozu. It also describes the mood of BANSHUN, the first of his six collaborations with famous actress Setsuko Hara, to whom we dedicated a comprehensive retrospective in 2016. Here she plays the unmarried Noriko, who is still living with her widowed father (Chishu Ryu) at the age of 27. Out of concern for his daughter’s future, he encourages her to get married. She emphatically refuses and wants to hold on her life with her father and her inner attachments. It’s only a trick that enables the father to get his daughter to marry. The enormous emotional stakes of this deeply moving everyday melodrama are mapped out between its two most iconic scenes. In them, the entire film becomes broken down into two precisely framed compositions, two still lives of objects in space and in landscape whose perfectly modulated mood could not be more fine or filigree. (mg)