The dissolution of a Japanese marriage: the wife complains of her husband’s dull provincialism, the husband chafes under his wife’s Western pretensions. Yasujiro Ozu’s delicate melodramas (this one dates from his finest period, 1952) avoid any sense of cliche in their restrained, sometimes painfully subtle study of family relationships. Ozu is the master of a difficult and austere style, in which the lack of camera movement sometimes speaks more than the elaborate techniques of his contemporaries. In Japanese with subtitles. 115 min.
