In my opinion,a mature cinematographer as Hou must not have made an "anniversary film" of a classic who has been dead for 40 years.
Cinema and film industry has changed quite a lot for these 40 years,and the conditions,with which Ozu had made his films, in fact, has almost vanished even soon after his death. In France Alain Resnais had made two revolutionary films("L' Année dernière à Marienbad" and "Muriel ou Le temps d'un retour"),Godard and Truffaut was in quest of new relationship between words, sound and image.In Japan, Oshima and Imamura was struggling with contemporary social and political reality,to say something new by cinema. Even Kurosawa,Keisuke Kinoshita and Masaki Kobayashi was trying to represent the new reality.
Ozu was a great filmmaker, but he was already a man of the past in the first 1960s'. What irritates me in Hou's film is the fact that he clearly knows it all, and only tries to show "the beauty in life as it is" in Tokyo and Japanese countryside which he has never lived. His style is consistent as before, but what he wants to show us,lacks his own view to the reality, to contemporary Japanese people. He vainly tries to show what retired generations or young conservative people who stopped thinking want to see in Ozu's films, what is too quiet and beautiful and what is not true. It's the greatest difference between this film and his former masterpieces.
Cinema and film industry has changed quite a lot for these 40 years,and the conditions,with which Ozu had made his films, in fact, has almost vanished even soon after his death. In France Alain Resnais had made two revolutionary films("L' Année dernière à Marienbad" and "Muriel ou Le temps d'un retour"),Godard and Truffaut was in quest of new relationship between words, sound and image.In Japan, Oshima and Imamura was struggling with contemporary social and political reality,to say something new by cinema. Even Kurosawa,Keisuke Kinoshita and Masaki Kobayashi was trying to represent the new reality.
Ozu was a great filmmaker, but he was already a man of the past in the first 1960s'. What irritates me in Hou's film is the fact that he clearly knows it all, and only tries to show "the beauty in life as it is" in Tokyo and Japanese countryside which he has never lived. His style is consistent as before, but what he wants to show us,lacks his own view to the reality, to contemporary Japanese people. He vainly tries to show what retired generations or young conservative people who stopped thinking want to see in Ozu's films, what is too quiet and beautiful and what is not true. It's the greatest difference between this film and his former masterpieces.