Format: Streaming video from Hulu+ on laptop.
I don’t have a great deal of experience watching the films of Yasujiro Ozu. Ukigusa (Floating Weeds, and sometimes spelled Ukikusa) is only the third of his films that I’ve seen. I’ve noticed some themes, though. First, Ozu hated to move his camera. While he’s happy to cut between shots, almost everything he does is a static shot. This lends an unusual quality to his films—despite people moving within each scene, there is very much a sense of a static world, almost a still life with people in it.
The second thing is that Ozu appears to be obsessed with family relationships. Even in a film like this one, where a huge percentage of the main characters are a part of a traveling theater troupe, it’s all about family and about the relationships between people. The problems here are the problems of real, believable people. We aren’t changing the world, but dealing with life. Of course, for these people, it is the world.
