I watched my DVD of Yasujiro Ozu’s 1934 silent feature A Story of Floating Weeds a day after limping home from a screening of Van Helsing; I watched the remake, 1959’s more simply titled Floating Weeds, shortly after a similarly numbing multiplex experience with Troy. And as diligently as the two more contemporary works labored to make me hate movies, Ozu’s twin oases of tact, sensitivity, and elegance were ameliorating enough to quell such feelings, logical as they seemed in the wake of Kate Beckinsale’s vee-must-kill-moose-and-squirrel accent and Brad Pitt’s spectacularly overpaid teenage petulance.

But then, putting Ozu’s films in counterpoint to just about anything else can prove curiously jarring: whispered masterpieces all, their perfection must walk hand in hand with their self-effacement. As such, they don’t necessarily lend themselves to splashy DVD presentations, which is why the Criterion Collection’s two-disc release housing both versions of Floating Weeds comes equipped with only the sparsest and most tasteful of bells and whistles. Whatever their occasional lapses in title selection—George bloody Washington?—this is a company whose general commitment towards delicately fitting form to content mirrors Ozu’s own. As for the films themselves, they resist criticism in the manner of all such self-contained marvels. Both take as their subject the appearance of an itinerant theatrical troupe into an isolated peasant village, and both reflect Ozu’s career-long interest in filial dissolution and dissent. Neither can exactly be construed as comedies, although there are instances in both where Ozu’s barely suppressed delight in quiet visual slapstick is apparent—cutting pointedly amongst the heavily made-up visages of the kabuki performers in Floating Weeds, he deflates their clownish thespian pomposity even as he subtly ratchets up the pathos.

There is thus an element of showbiz satire in the basic story of both films, but it is carried out with a heavy heart: the indifference of the town to these travelling players feels callow, a widespread bout of wilful ignorance towards a tradition that, however mercenary, probably deserves to be honored. But it is indifference of another sort that truly drives both narratives, that attributed to the troupe’s leader—Kihachi in the original, and Komajuro in the remake—whose homecoming is marred by cruel revelations of abandonment.

Reunited with his former mistress and their estranged son, Kihachi/Komajuro, depicted in both films as an affable man and eminently respectable actor, receives a painful emotional comeuppance. His long-ago decision to leave the people who needed him has doomed him to much present-tense frustration, but, these being Ozu films, there’s plenty of empathy to go around.

This empathy is slightly more evident in the second Floating Weeds, which further fleshes out its characters thanks to the benefit of spoken dialogue, in addition to an extended running time. The key to Ozu’s humanism is its unobtrusiveness, and the same can be said for his visual aesthetic. These are films that respect their characters enough to simply let them exist within a physical space and regard them, rarely, if ever, editorializing through the use of lighting or exaggerated perspectives. His aforementioned pokes at the members of the theater troupe in Floating Weeds are a rare exception, but even then, they’re hardly unflattering, but rather merely representative of the often tenuous relationship between a person’s professional “face” and their internal mechanisms of self-recognizance.

There’s nothing on either of these discs to rival the expansive, valedictory treatment accorded Criterion’s earlier release of Tokyo Story: that lushly appointed set seemed designed towards providing the uninitiated with a broad beginner’s overview of the director’s work and influence. Tokyo Story is admittedly a pretty good place to start: its picture-box compositions and smile-through-your-tears coda make it, through no fault of its own, really, Ozu for Dummies. And, to be fair, also Ozu for Geniuses: the most memorable extra on Tokyo Story is a dour-looking, chain-smoking Aki Kaurismäki blaming his idol for his own self-described series of “failures.”

But just as Criterion’s steady proliferation of Akira Kurosawa titles featured less generalized (but no less fascinating) supplements over time, the quiet explosion of Ozu features—including the soon-upcoming, much-anticipated Early Summer—has yielded increasingly scholarly addendums.

To that end, Donald Richie’s commentary on A Story of Floating Weeds is among the best Criterion has ever commissioned. In print, Richie has a tendency, endemic perhaps to historiographical critics, to seem deadwood-dry, but with Ozu’s images unfolding before him, he abandons staid academic posture to indicate a genuine, even fannish, enthusiasm for the movie at hand.

The same goes, but more predictably, for Roger Ebert’s happily overbearing commentary on Floating Weeds, a film he has famously canonized in print, as part of his Great Movies series. If ol’ Rog could ever work up the patience and subsequent talent for insight he reserves for safely ensconced classics like Floating Weeds and apply it to the work of apparent modern nemeses like Abbas Kiarostami—whose measured and minimalist style, after all, is not all that dissimilar to Ozu’s—he might remain a relevant critic. Alas.
—ADAM NAYMAN