The Story of Floating Weeds, made near the end of Ozu’s silent period, was apparently one of his favorites, since he remade it twenty-five years later with almost no changes in the script except the addition of dialogue.
The floating weeds are people with no fixed abode, in this case touring actors. One of their fairly regular stops is a small town where the boss Kihachi tends to disappear for much of the time, spending his days with a woman who, we eventually learn, is the mother of his child. The boy is now grown up. Kihachi’s current mistress, the manager and leading actress of the troupe, eventually finds out why they keep coming through this unprofitable little town and, out of jealousy, pays a young actress to seduce the son.
This backfires for all concerned, for it ends up destroying Kihachi’s relationship with his “nephew” and the acting company as well. After rejection by his son, Kihachi leaves as well but is joined at the last moment by the mistress, and as they wait for the train they begin to discuss plans for a new troupe.
As the plot line suggests, this has all the makings of a full-blown backstage melodrama, with actors acting on and off stage and tears and screaming and all the other aspects of the backstage world usually seen in movies. Yet, that is not Ozu’s real interest here.
The movie is something of a transition for him, both stylistically and in its subject matter. Moving away from his early free-wheeling comedies, he is now in the world of the Japanese family, which would later become his all but exclusive subject matter. But one foot is still in the visual comedy world, with a pantomime horse that pauses to scratch itself and a boy in a dog suit, played by Tokkan Kozo who stole the movie in Passing Fancy and here steals his scene again onstage.
The signature low, low camera is now present in many scenes, but he still retains some of the old silent film mobility, so the movie lacks the choppy feel of many of his later talkies. But some of the crime melodrama world he was also working in at the time creeps through, for there is a practically unheard of scene for an Ozu movie. When Kihachi catches the actress coming from his son’s room, he slaps her. The Son in turn hits Kihachi, only then to be told by his mother that he has just hit his father.
The characters are observed with the humane dispassion that would become Ozu’s post-war trademark, while his new static, low-level camera leaves us free to observe the small details that make up real life, such as a long chat over sake with the boy’s mother or a lyrical scene of father and son fishing together.
But, as often happens with Ozu’s movies, that detailed look at Japanese culture leaves more questions than it answers for the outsider. For example, how old is the boy? He is old enough not only for sex but for marriage, yet he still wears a school uniform. The town is so small and so far in the boondocks that he couldn’t possibly be at a university. His mother is concerned that he will soon be eligible for conscription. The actor, Koji Mitsui, certainly looks as thin as a teenager, but most Japanese men of the day looked the same way and the actor himself was 25, much the age he looks in his face.
More significantly, why would the seduction of the young man be such a terrible thing that it could destroy both the practical family of the acting troupe and the dream family Kihachi visits only occasionally? Had one of the actors seduced Kihachi’s daughter, this would have caused outrage in just about any world culture. But for a young man to sleep with an actress from a touring troupe would hardly raise an eyebrow anywhere in the world. Why does it do so much damage here? Particularly since she immediately legitimizes it all by opting to marry the young man. We have to accept that the damage is done, but we don’t really understand quite how.
So, once again as in so many other Ozu films, we are left with a gentle, sincere, and humane film, with something at its core that seems to make sense only to the Japanese. It is interesting to watch and, in its resigned way, the ending is quite moving, but we still feel like we’ve missed something of vital importance along the way.
