Floating Weeds

Yasujiro Ozu's late-career, elegiac masterpiece about a travelling kabuki troupe that returns to the seaside town they visited years before.

When a travelling kabuki troupe brings their show to a seaside port, Komajurô (Ganjirô Nakamura), an ageing actor, is reunited with his former lover, sake bar owner Oyoshi (Haruki Sugimura), and his illegitimate son Kiyoshi (Hiroshi Kawaguchi), to the distress of his current mistress Sumiko (Machiko Kyô). From this simple scenario, Japanese master Yasujirô Ozu builds, one exquisite image at a time, a saga of profound humanity and rich understanding.

Towards the end of his career, Ozu returned to a story he had made some 25 years earlier as a silent, Ukigusa monogatari [A Tale of Floating Weeds, aka A Story of Floating Weeds], for this magnificent colour reworking, photographed by legendary cinematographer Kazuo Miyagawa (Rashômon, Ugetsu monogatari). Encompassing a novelistic range of emotions and tones with the utmost delicacy, Floating Weeds stands tall even amidst a body of work as extraordinary as Ozu’s.