Saturday | October 23, 1999 4:00 pm

Tokyo Twilight
(Tokyo boshoku)

Screening on Film

Directed by Yasujiro Ozu.
With Setsuko Hara, Isuzu Yamada, Chishu Ryu.
Japan, 1957, 16mm, black & white, 141 min.
Japanese with English subtitles.

Ozu’s last black-and-white film, this is perhaps his darkest and harshest depiction of the disintegration of the family. Ozu regular, Chishu Ryu plays a father living alone with his two daughters. The women discover that their mother, whom they thought dead, is actually living nearby with another man. This shocking information results in despair, destruction and isolation. Certainly the filmmaker’s most melodramatic film, it reflects an extreme pessimism without precedent in Ozu’s work.