BUY TICKETS HERE
Join us at 1 p.m. Sunday, Aug. 17 for director Yajusiro Ozu’s endearing “Good Morning” (1959), a lighthearted take on the filmmaker’s perennial theme of the challenges of intergenerational relationships.
The movie tells the story of two young boys who stop speaking in protest after their parents refuse to buy a television set. Ozu weaves a wealth of subtle gags through a family portrait as rich as those of his dramatic films, mocking the foibles of the adult world through the eyes of his child protagonists.
Shot in stunning color and set in a suburb of Tokyo where housewives gossip about the neighbors’ new washing machine and unemployed husbands look for work as door-to-door salesmen, this charming comedy refashions Ozu’s own silent classic “I Was Born, But . . .” to gently satirize consumerism in postwar Japan.
The film will be projected in 2K digital format.
“From its very opening, Good Morning (1959) is deeply and delightfully musical, both in the orchestration of static visual elements in its first two shots and in its rhythmic patterns of human movement, as various figures cross the pathways between houses, between houses and hill, and on top of the hill itself—always, mysteriously, moving from right to left. And what could be more musical than the opening gag, occurring on the same sunny hilltop, of little boys farting for their own amusement, still another form of theme and variations?
“Good Morning has its own ways of ironically comparing children and grown-ups, such as juxtaposing timid small talk between a youthful couple waiting for a train with the schoolboys’ farting game. (There is also an implicit comparison in the depiction of the adults’ childish envy when one household purchases a TV set and another a new washing machine.) Movie posters for Stanley Kramer’s The Defiant Ones and Louis Malle’s The Lovers, combined with various glimpses of sumo wrestlers on TV, allude not only to the recalcitrant sons but also to a sense of antagonistic parties chained together by circumstance that often seems to function just below the surface of the everyday pleasantries.
“A grandmother muttering gripes between her prayers, the drunken Tomizawa coming home to the wrong house, the young scat-singing couple being quietly hounded out of the community, a thoughtful Keitaro wondering if television will “produce 100 million idiots”—all these moments are characteristically uninflected, and each goes straight to the heart of the film.” — Jonathan Rosenbaum
Tickets are $6 and available at the link above. Students use code STUDENT at checkout for free admission (must show student ID at the door).
