Early silent film from acclaimed Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu, "A Story of Floating Weeds" is an ostensibly simple tale of the head of an itinerant troupe of Kabuki players reconnecting with his teenage son Shinkichi (Koji Mitsui). The boy, who had been told that his father was a civil servant who had died, is a student 'with prospects' and the father does not want him to know of his humble origins. As he says to one of the female players in his troupe "My son belongs to a better world than yours", which of course, is the same world as his. Although the focus of the story is on the 'master' and his secret family, there are a number of entertaining scenes featuring the troupe as they are stuck in the town with their performances rained out, broke and bored, which much of the gentle humour coming at the expense of Tomi-boh (Tomio Aoki),the little boy with the errant bladder who plays a dog in the troupe's show. I watched an English-subtitled Criterion Edition on TCM and my only criticism is that the piano score seemed (IMO) too 'Western' for the setting (but I have no idea what the original music was like). The film is a slow-moving but poignant and beautifully filmed taste of pre-WW2 Japanese life. Later audiences would have found Shinkichi's mother's statement that he'll soon be old enough for the draft much more foreboding than Ozu could have intended. Remade by the same director as "Floating Weeds" in 1959.

Admittedly, this is the first film I've seen of Ozu, but I definitely get a sense that this wasn't a great place to start. It was pretty good but I could almost feel Ozu's slower, more contemplative style really straining to come out.

It's a melodrama about a traveling actor and his son, who thinks he (the actor) is his (the son's) uncle. When "Uncle" comes to visit with his struggling acting troupe, the 20-year-old son falls in love with one of the actresses under the uncle, which causes a lot of drama as actors are very low class in the Japanese society of the time and the father left his son specifically to keep him away from such a low-class situation (at least that's what he says... his motivations may be a bit different).

The key thing at work in this film is definitely craft. Ozu obviously has a very specific, strong craft to the way he organizes things. Yet still this film is rather straining against it's cuts, so to speak, and even if I haven't seen it, I'd imagine Ozu's own remake "Floating Weeds" is better as it's probably more contemplative and presents the dialog-rich story in sound.

I'm not saying this is a bad film in any rate, I'm just saying that I can tell from watching it that Ozu can do better.

--PolarisDiB

For a movie released in 1934, it is very odd that this is a silent film. While I love Japanese cinema and have seen many, many movies from this country, this is about the oldest one I have seen and couldn't understand it being silent. Perhaps they were just VERY far behind in switching to "talkies"--although even in Europe, Sound movies were pretty much the norm by about 1931 or so.

Apart from this odd feature of the film, I found it to be almost a carbon copy of the remake of this film that the director made 25 years later. In fact, they were so similar, I really didn't find it all that necessary to have seen both. This, combined with the better technical merits, make the remake a better viewing experience for the average viewer--though film historians and cinephiles will probably be interested in both versions. Fortunately, the Criterion release includes BOTH versions! What a deal! The story is a melancholy tale of an itinerant actor who owns a troop of small-time actors. After many years, he returns to a small town where his illegitimate son lives with his birth mother. The boy, now nearly a full-grown man, thinks that the actor is his uncle--a ruse that has been perpetuated all his life. While I could discuss this central relationship further and discuss the twists and turns the plot takes, it would be best you see it for yourself. It is a rewarding and sad tale that involves regrets, responsibility and "what might have been"--just the sort of movie that makes you think and doesn't give easy answers. An excellent film well worth seeing.