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12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Not a classic but worthwhile viewing nonetheless,
By anthemic (Australia) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Record of a Tenement Gentleman [VHS] (VHS Tape)
'Record of a Tenement Gentleman' is a lesser known Ozu film. It does not have that 'stamp of masterpiece' one often sees allocated to 'Tokyo Story' or "I Was Born But...' But it is still fine viewing nonetheless. Putting it another way, there are some directors who at their best do well indeed - and when not at their best still do well. Jean Renoir or Terrence Malick are good cases in point - as is Ozu. Its subject matter, character types and themes pre-empt those of the 1998 award-winning 'Central Station' by Walter Salles.It tells the story of a 'child-hating' widow (Otane) who is coerced into taking in a homeless boy (Kohei) by one of her neighbours (played by ubiquitous 'Ozuian' actor Chishu Ryu). The film follows the developing relationship from her resentment of him to their inevitable attachement for each other. Strained relationships between children and parents (she symbolises the maternal figure)is common territory for Ozu. His constant use of parallel action is to a lesser degree here as there are less main characters to speak of. The transition that occurs is observed through the mundaness of everyday life. The mundane aside - the film is still loaded with humour. Ozu is great for picking inappropriate times to appear funny. Without giving too much away - these moments tend to come from Otane's hardened expressions and disdain for Kohei. You feel sympathy for Kohei but at the same time you realise this is Otane's facade - her hardened exterior. Wait until you see the beach sequence and you will laugh yourself silly. One scene is perhaps inter-textually referenced by contrast in the later released 'Tokyo Story' - where the grandmother is seen playing with grandchild in long shot. Non-diegetical music (outside the world of the characters ie score) tends to be Western while diegetical music (inside the world) is Japanese. This blend brings a wonderful fusion of East meets West. The humour working alongside the lighthearted score offers an easily palatable film. Overall, 'Record of a Tenement Gentleman' is tender in expression and poignant in heart. For those familiar with Ozu is it unlikely this film will be disappointing since it reworks familiar themes. However, this might not be a good starting point for those unaccustomed to his cinematic style. In which case, I would suggest 'Late Spring' or 'Tokyo Story'. Finally, speaking in approximate figures - Ozu made 55 films during his career and only half of those exist today. This reduction to 28 films is further mutilated by the limited release of Ozu to about 10 films. Here, I present to you my final reason why you should see this film - part of the precious value of gems is that they are hard to come buy.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Ozu's Characters Always Please,
By Little Dorrit "ldorrit" (WA state) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Record of a Tenement Gentleman [VHS] (VHS Tape)
This particular gem of Ozu's is set very soon after the war and things are pretty tough for most of the population, but for lost little boys things are difficult indeed. One little boy is blessed though by being brought back to a small community of neighbors in a "tenement". Though at first he is seen only as a hindrance and one more mouth to feed, the awakening to how hard people have become and how selfish in their quest for survival helps one particularly hardcase of a lady learn that a little shared with love becomes a lot more. Ozu's gentle ways will always make me smile.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Ozu's finest moment?,
By
This review is from: Record of a Tenement Gentleman [VHS] (VHS Tape)
Record of a Tenement Gentleman (Yasujiro Ozu, 1947)
When you mention the name Yasujiro Ozu, film critics, amateur and professional alike, fly into bouts of ecstasy. I keep a record of thousand-best lists I've found over the years (it has eleven thousand-best lists, both from single critics and from collectives, and I know of at least one more I need to add). If you go simply by number of films by any given director on the list, Ozu is tied for twenty-second (with Robert Aldrich, Michael Curtiz, and Ernst Lubitsch), with fourteen films on the list. As a contrast, directors with fifteen films include Fellini and Malle, and Kurosawa has 16. (The undisputed king of directors? Hitchcock, with thirty-three. Godard is second, with twenty-eight.) This, I should mention, is from a total stable of one thousand, four hundred thirty directors who have at least one movie on the list. (For trivia buffs: six hundred thirty-eight directors have more than one film on the list.) Critics love Ozu. Of the fourteen films that made at least one thousand-best list, six of them show up on more than one. Tokyo Monogatari shows up on eight of them, Late Spring on five. All that said, Ozu directed forty films over and above the fourteen that have gotten such critical acclaim; with such a body of work (fifty-four extant films, as opposed to, say, Hitchcock's sixty-six), and with American provincialism being what it was for much of Ozu's career, it stands to reason that a number of his movies have simply been overlooked by critics. There's an Ozu renaissance going on right now, however, with whole new generations discovering the pleasures of the Japanese master of the slow film. I have little doubt that, as it gains momentum, some of those forty movies are going to start finding their way into thousand-best lists. In fact, I can guarantee it, for his 1947 masterpiece, Record of a Tenement Gentleman, has already found its way into mine. The plot is nothing special. You've seen it before. (In fact, I wondered more than once how much another film on my thousand-best list, Takeshi Kitano's Kikujiro, was based on this movie. Or, for an American cognate, there's On Golden Pond.) A young, homeless child named Kohei (Hohi Aoki, at the beginning of his very brief film career; like much of this cast, he would return two years later in Late Spring) and his father appear in a tenement, and the father asks someone to watch him for a bit. No one wants to care for the child, but eventually he's left in the care of Tane (Stray Dog's Choko Iida, one of the great actors of her generation), a bitter widow. Next morning, the father has vanished. Tane and Kohei hit the road, going back to Kohei's neighborhood, only to find out dad has hightailed it for Tokyo. Tane means to leave him there, but he follows her home. From there, it's the age-old story of a friendship developing between two people who couldn't be more dissimilar. This is a storyline that gets tweaked any number of ways as it gets adapted over and over again by writers everywhere, but everyone who writes it seems to want to game the system somehow. There's always a feeling of manipulation in such a storyline, no matter how subtle it may be (Kitano makes the adult unlikable and the kid cute, where Rydell flipped that formula in On Golden Pond, for example); you know human beings don't act quite like that, but there's not enough of a difference, most of the time, to really think about it. Until, that is, you see Record of a Tenement Gentleman. This was Ozu's first film after World War II, co-written with the great thirties screenwriter Tadao Ikeda (who would script only two more films after this), and the bloom was off the lily in so very many ways. Still, Ozu isn't afraid to include some gentle comedy in this very human drama. To soften the blow of what is, in the main, an incredibly depressing character study or to highlight it we can never be quite sure, but it somehow manages both effects at once, no small feat. Iida turns in an incredible performance here. A number of the minor players do as well, but this is Iida's movie, and she gives what may well be the performance of her career. (I can't claim to have seen anywhere near her entire output, and probably never will. This saddens me greatly.) Ozu was, of course, already a great director by 1947, and had spent a number of years being a great director; the first film on those collected thousand-best lists was released seventeen years before this one. You can bank on the fact that Ozu was doing great work here, as he did all the way up to his death in 1962. As far as I'm concerned, Record of a Tenement Gentleman is right up there with the big-name Ozu joints that send critics spinning off in the aisles like dervishes. In fact, I like it slightly better than I did Tokyo Monogatari, though one must emphasize the "slightly" there. But when you're in stratospheres like this (I haven't assigned Record of a Tenement Gentleman an actual place in the thousand-best hierarchy yet, though I will say that Tokyo Monogatari currently sits on the list at #69), where there are only a handful of directors that makes films this good or better, "slightly" begins to lose its meaning, no? Yasujiro Ozu was one of the finest directors ever to pick up a camera, and Record of a Tenement Gentleman is, in my opinion, his finest work (though I admit I have a lot more Ozu to watch). The thirty-eighth film to have gotten a five star rating from me. *****
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