The Flavour of Green Tea Over Rice (Ochazuke no aji) (Directors Suite) (1952)

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General		Extras
Category	Drama	Main Menu Audio & Animation Audio Commentary-Dr Wendy Haslem & Dr Gabrielle Murray Trailer-Early Summer, Playtime, Mon Oncle, Latcho Drom
Rating
Year Of Production	1952
Running Time	110:58 (Case: 116)
RSDL / Flipper	RSDL (58:04)	Cast & Crew
Start Up	Menu
Region Coding	4	Directed By	Yasujiro Ozu
Studio Distributor	Shochiku Madman Entertainment	Starring	Shin Saburi Michiyo Kogure Koji Tsuruta Chikage Awashima Keiko Tsushima Eijirô Yanagi Kuniko Miyake Koji Shitara Chishu Ryu Yűko Mochizuki Hisao Toake
Case	Amaray-Transparent
RPI	$34.95	Music	Ichirô Saitô

    The Flavour of Green Tea Over Rice examines the marital difficulties of middle-class couple Mokichi (Shin Saburi) and Taeko (Michiyo Kogure). He is a business executive while she spends her time with friends - they are wealthy enough to have a maid to attend to the household duties. The pair live quite separate lives and she tells her friends she could do without him. Meanwhile their niece Setsuko (Keiko Tsushima) avoids marriage meetings, citing the marriage between her aunt and uncle as a reason why she would not want an arranged pairing. Their relationship problems come to a head when Mokichi has to travel abroad for business.

    The first draft of the screenplay was written more than a decade prior to the film being made. Never interested in supporting the nationalist semi-military regime that ruled Japan from the early 1930s, Ozu had avoided making films which endorsed either the war in China or government policy. After a period of compulsory military service Ozu wrote the first version of The Flavour of Green Tea Over Rice in 1939. The major difference in the original version was that the husband was drafted into military service, not sent on a business trip to Uruguay. As the film dealt with marital difficulties it was quickly rejected by the censors. Instead he made Brothers and Sisters of the Toda Family and There Was a Father, both of which contain elements that endorse government policy. After being redrafted into the army Ozu was captured by the British and interned in a prisoner of war camp. He did not return to Japan until early 1946. It would be another six years before he would get to film a revised version of his Green Tea screenplay. Presumably it was not acceptable under the Allied occupation either and had to wait until the new Japan resumed control of its own destiny.

    The title of the film refers to ochazuke, a popular dish of green tea poured over rice, usually with additional toppings. The original title is literally The Taste of Ochazuke. The dish itself is not so important but the context in which it is consumed forms the climax of the film. And the leftover rice which forms the basis of the meal and is revived by addition of tea can be seen as a metaphor for the couple's marriage.

    I am not sure that this is one of Ozu's best works. Instead of his usual 1950s fare which dealt with relationships between parents and their offspring, the film examines the difficulties within a marriage. For that reason it is less sentimental and though the ending is upbeat, the tone for most of the film feels a little darker and more depressing than most of Ozu's 1950s films (Tokyo Twilight excluded). It is also difficult for much of the film to feel a lot of sympathy for either the husband or the wife, so while the story rings true the viewer's emotional involvement is impeded.

    The usual Ozu trademarks are present. Some of the compositions involving foreground objects are more complex or more emphatic than in Late Spring, while the scenes involving people seen in rooms from other rooms are more subtly handled. There are still several travelling shots but these seem more noticeable than in the earlier work. Perhaps this was a transitional film, with Ozu somewhere between his original Westernised style and his later distinctive pared-back approach.

    In this film more so than in Late Spring there are what have been termed "pillow shots". These are seemingly random images of objects both indoor and outdoor - for example a water tower - that bookend scenes. These shots generally do not have any obvious relevance to the narrative. There has been a lot of speculation about these pillow shots and their purpose. To me they serve the same end as the optical wipes or fades to black that Ozu might have used in the 1930s and which Kurosawa and other directors were still using. They indicate a transition between scenes and the passing of time. Also they are important in the pacing of the film, allowing the viewer to absorb what has transpired and to clear their mind for what is about to occur.

    This is one of the later films for which there is no prominent role for Chishu Ryu. He appears in a couple of scenes as the owner of a pachinko parlour, a former army buddy of Mokichi. The male lead is taken by Shin Saburi, also a regular in the director's films. In order to convey the nature of the character he gives what might appear to be a very laid back, often inexpressive performance. Michiyo Kogure is very effective as his wife. This would be her only appearance in an Ozu film, as was the case for Koji Tsuruta who plays Non-chan, a younger friend of Mokichi. Tsuruta would leave Shochiku shortly after this film and in the 1960s become a major film star. His career seems to have derailed in the 1970s. The story that I've heard is that he claimed to have trained as a kamikaze pilot, due to fly a suicide mission on the day that the Emperor announced the surrender. During the publicity campaign for his film Father of the Kamikaze some reporters discovered that he had never been considered for suicide duty, and the ensuing controversy damaged his standing. Whether that's true or not (detailed information about him is hard to come by) he was a distinguished navy pilot and was buried with military honours when he died in 1987.

    Although this film would not be in the first rank of his work, any Ozu is better than none at all and there is some interest in how the film is constructed as well as it being an insight into the lives of middle-class Japanese circa 1952.

Video

    The film is presented in an aspect ratio of 1.33:1, which is close to the original aspect ratio of 1.37:1, and is in the original black and white.

    I have to say that I am a little disappointed with the transfer. The main issue is posterization, which is prevalent throughout. Frequently in backgrounds banding is visible. For example, during the scene in the outdoor baseball park there are several shots of the sky where banding is quite noticeable. Worse though is that posterization can clearly be seen on the faces of the actors. Like the example in our artefacts guide, there are areas on the skin where the tone has a sudden change from one shade to another, rather than the graduated appearance that would be more natural.

    It also looks like a lot of the film grain has been removed. It has not been done to the extent that excessive noise reduction artefacts appear, but the impression I get is of a slightly unnatural appearance.

    The end result of this is that although the transfer looks sharp and clear on a standard television, when blown up to any size it doesn't look good at all. In fact it looks slightly out of focus. It does not have that snap that I associate with good transfers of older films and even allowing for the age and condition of the source material the transfer seems less than ideal.

    The contrast also seems a bit weak. Black levels are often poor. I noticed several occasions where there appeared to be a brief white sheen to the image, which may be the result of issues with the source material. In terms of film artefacts there is a constant flicker, occasional faint scratches and some often pronounced frame judder. At 49:05 there were several missing frames which causes a jump and loss of some of the audio.

    Optional English subtitles are available in a choice of yellow or white. Both are quite clear and easy to read, though the yellow subtitles seem to stand out too much.

    This is an RSDL-formatted disc with the layer break at 58:04 during a scene change.

Video Ratings Summary

Sharpness
Shadow Detail
Colour
Grain/Pixelization
Film-To-Video Artefacts
Film Artefacts
Overall

Audio

    The original mono audio is presented here in a Dolby Digital 2.0 format.

    It appears that little or no attempt has been made to clean up the audio. The dialogue is accompanied by a noise not dissimilar to a herd of old age pensioners shuffling through a field of tin foil. When there is no dialogue, this noise drops away. At times there is a low rhythmic thumping sound, though this is not loud enough to be distracting. There are a couple of instances where the sound level rises sharply, for example at around  70:24. When this happens the fidelity seems better and the sound fuller though reverberant.

    This being said the dialogue seems to be clear throughout. There is some brief missing audio as noted in the video review.

    The unusual music score by Ichiro Saito starts off being quite merry, perhaps more so than would seem appropriate. Later in the film it becomes more serious in tone. There is not a lot of music and some of it is intended to be taken as occurring as part of the on-screen action, for example as background music in the pachinko parlour. The music sounds a little thin on this soundtrack.

Audio Ratings Summary

Dialogue
Audio Sync
Clicks/Pops/Dropouts
Surround Channel Use
Subwoofer
Overall

Main Menu Audio and Animation

    Some of the score plus a succession of publicity stills.

Audio Commentary-Dr Wendy Haslem and Dr Gabrielle Murray

    Another locally produced commentary with two Melbourne-based university lecturers, this one is significantly better than the one supplied for the simultaneously released Late Spring. The main reason is that the two academics try to provide a historical context for the film as well as background on the director and some of his cast and crew. The commentary is interesting and informative. There always seems to be a "but..." though and this commentary has some problems. I get the impression the commentators may not have been sufficiently prepared. They have trouble pronouncing some of the Japanese names: Shin Saburi's family name is given as "Shaburi" which I think is wrong, and Kenji Mizoguchi's is rendered by one of the commentators as "Mizoguchu" which I'm certain is wrong. There are a few fluffed lines which could have been edited out. In addition there were several statements that sound as though they were something they had read in a book and had not thoroughly considered, for example the usual myths about Ozu's camera position and his standing as the most Japanese of directors. There's also mention of the influence of Zen and the concept of mono no aware in Ozu's work, something which was pretty much debunked in David Bordwell's excellent book Ozu and the Poetics of Cinema (hang on, that's something I read in a book...).

    Another statement is made in reference to the titles of Ozu's later films being about changes of seasons and transitions and so on. One should be careful about making such claims as the English titles of some of the films mentioned are not direct translations of the original Japanese titles. For example An Autumn Afternoon should really be The Taste of Saury while The End of Summer should be Autumn For the Kohayagawa Family.

    Despite this there is some interesting stuff in the commentary and it's worth dipping into, at the least.

Trailers (10:48)

    Four trailers, three unrelated to the main feature, preceded by the usual warning that illegal copying causes birth defects or some such nonsense. The trailers are Early Summer, Playtime, Mon Oncle and Latcho Drom.

    The Region 2 version released by Shochiku for the Ozu centenary in 2003 has no English subtitles.

    Panorama's Region 3 release has poorly translated subtitles and problematic contrast, according to the only review I could find.

    Tartan's Region 2 UK release comes paired with Record of a Tenement Gentleman. The transfer is a standards conversion. Extras are limited to a photo gallery and a three-minute restoration documentary.

    All in all, I think that the Region 4 release is to be preferred, even though it is not ideal.

    A fine film though perhaps not the best of this director.

    The video quality is a little disappointing.

    The audio quality is below average.

    The commentary has some value, otherwise there are no extras of note.

Video
Audio
Extras
Plot
Overall